


Unbreak The Broken

by Kangofu_CB



Series: Barton's Halfway House for Ex-Brainwashed Assassins [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 90s technological advances, 90s typical fashion music decor and internet, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Barton Feels, Family Feels, Found Family, Holocaust, If Bucky Barnes escaped from Hydra early, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Marvel 616 References, Medical Experimentation, Mentions of childhood abuse, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Protective Clint Barton, SHIELD Agent Clint Barton, Slow Burn, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, babies are complicated little beings, birthday celebration, canon typical descriptions of torture, canon typical sad backstories, farm shenanigans, mentions of:, seriously I am not kidding when I say slow, small town life, social commentary on Jurassic Park, the MCU reimagined completely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22635730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/pseuds/Kangofu_CB
Summary: Sometimes a family is three assassins and a baby, and that'sfine.
Relationships: Eventually - Relationship, James "Bucky" Barnes & Clint Barton, James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Series: Barton's Halfway House for Ex-Brainwashed Assassins [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467970
Comments: 486
Kudos: 572





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the continuation of a huge project for me, one that's super close to my heart and that I've been working on for a long time. It started out as "What if the secret family on Clint Barton's secret farm was actually Bucky Barnes and their adopted murder children?" and here we are.
> 
> This section of fic spans several months after Natasha turns herself into SHIELD, and mostly centers around a classic found family trope. For everyone wondering where the hell this baby came from, you're about to find out! 
> 
> This is part two of five separate parts that deal with different periods of time in Clint, Bucky, and Natasha's lives. This section is focused on James and Clint's growing relationship, but there are no romantic pairings. I don't like to lead people on although ultimately this is a Winterhawk fic with a Clintasha bromance, and I hope you all like it.

November 28, 1998

Clint rumbled to a stop in front of the house, the tiny rental car unhappy with force of the brisk winds. Clint was mostly happy there wasn’t any snow on the ground for the tires to slip on, because the tired little sedan definitely wasn’t equipped with snow tires. 

He shifted into park and sighed heavily. It was only two days after Thanksgiving, but Clint wasn’t sure he had much to give thanks about.

James was not going to be happy to see him, he was sure. He was going to be even less happy to see him without Natasha, and frankly, Clint had no good answers for any of the questions he would definitely ask. 

He didn’t know how long Natasha was going to be kept sequestered, whether they were going to throw her in or under a prison, if she was going to be prosecuted or if she was going to be deprogrammed and put to use - Clint just didn’t _know_. All of it was information he’d tried to surreptitiously get from Coulson and, as usual, Clint had got nowhere trying to get information out of the other man. Phil had just smiled politely and sent him on his way. 

He heaved another sigh, and then climbed out of the car, gritting his teeth against the bitter wind, grabbing his duffle bag as he went, and stomped up the stairs. There was no way to hide his approach and Clint wasn’t too keen to try. Sneaking up on the Winter Soldier was probably a poor life choice, and one Clint wasn’t interested in making. 

So it surprised him, more than a little, to slide his key in the lock and open the door to a gun in his face _again_.

“Seriously, dude?” Clint asked, looking from the muzzle of the Beretta to James’ closed-off expression.

“Where’s Natalia?” he asked, the gun not even wavering. 

Clint rolled his eyes, but he also swallowed heavily. “She’s at S.H.I.E.L.D., exactly like we talked about.”

“Why are you here?”

“I got sent home!” Clint told him, angry about it all over again. “Coulson said ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you’ and sent me on my way, what do you want me to say?” Clint wondered if he should have just gone to his apartment in Bed-Stuy, little used though it was. He hadn’t even considered it at the time, though in retrospect maybe that was a mistake. 

James stared at him for another moment, then put the gun away, setting it on top of the tall wardrobe in the entryway. “You were hovering,” he accused, turning away. 

“I was not,” Clint argued, but he followed James into the kitchen, where he could smell the warm scent of brewed coffee. 

The only answer he got was a little huff of disbelief. 

“I wasn’t,” Clint continued, arguing with no-one. James handed him a cup of coffee without a word, and both of them sat at the little kitchen table in silence. It didn’t take long for the quiet to get just the smallest bit uncomfortable, and Clint looked around the house for lack of anything better to do.

James had been doing some cleaning and rearranging, Clint could tell. The table, for one, was scrubbed to a bare and shining clean, though it was still scarred up and worn from a lifetime of use. The whole house smelled faintly of lemon. The laminate counters were glossy, though, and the sink was a shiny stainless again. The living room furniture had been vacuumed or something, because the scent of dust was gone from the air, and the fabric looked brighter somehow. 

Clint turned his eyes back to James. The other man looked tired, more tired than Clint had maybe ever seen him, a little sallow with dark circles under his eyes, and Clint wondered if he’d slept at all since they’d left. 

“You alright, man?” 

Before James could answer, a piercing shriek rent the air, making Clint jump and slosh hot coffee over his hand. Startled, Clint looked around, heart racing, but James just got up with a sigh, leaving his cup behind. He was back down the stairs less than a minute later with an inconsolable Nathan in his arms. 

And Clint-

Clint had _never_ seen Nate cry. Not like this at all, with the tiny little guy sobbing his tiny little heart out. 

“Whatsa matter with him?” Clint asked, alarmed. 

James shrugged. “Wish I knew.”

Nate looked up with wide, tear-filled eyes, directly at Clint.

And then he held his chubby baby hands out, hiccupping small little cries that broke Clint’s heart. 

Clint got up from his seat without stopping to think about it, reflexively reaching for the baby. James reluctantly passed him over, clearly skeptical despite how often Clint had held Nate in the past, and the kid’s crying instantly dissolved into small, shuddery little breaths as he clenched his fists in Clint’s t-shirt. 

“What the fuck?” Clint asked James, supporting Nate on one arm and patting his back with the other hand. 

“Guess he missed you,” James grumbled, resuming his seat at the table and sipping his coffee. 

Clint had no idea what to do with that information, so he willfully ignored it, sitting back down and picking up the mug with the hand he’d been using to rub Nathan’s back. The baby was now snuggled into the side of his neck, one fist in his mouth, and Clint could hear the messy sound of him sucking on his hand and the occasional hiccuped breath. “He been like this the whole time?”

“Just since a couple of days after you and Nat took off,” James sighed. “Guess he realized you were gone or somethin’. He’s up all hours of the night, only sleeps twenty minutes at a time.”

James didn’t have to tell Clint how exhausting that was, and he’d been doing it for three or four days now.

“Go take a nap, man,” Clint told him, bouncing Nate slightly. “I can watch the kid for a while.”

He got a skeptical look in return, but it was clear that James was aching for sleep. 

“Seriously,” Clint said, reaching out and taking James’ mug from him. “Get some rest for a couple of hours. I promise I won’t let him die while you’re counting sheep.”

“Very comforting,” James told him dryly, but he let Clint take his coffee, and - after a thorough glance that conveyed everything James knew about murdering someone in one steely-eyed glare - reluctantly climbed the stairs. 

Nathan mostly slept while James was gone, snuggled into Clint’s chest with a hand still twisted in the cotton of his shirt, clinging on for dear life. Clint settled onto the couch - and yep, James had definitely done something to it to get rid of the musty smell - and turned on the television, looking for something to hold his attention while he waited on one or both of them to wake up. He finally settled on a football game between two teams he didn’t even remotely care about, and finished off James’ coffee. 

He was relaxed for the first time in a week, if he were being honest. He couldn’t do shit for Nat - she had to do for herself, he figured, and Coulson _had_ made it sound like they had plans for her beyond prison when he’d sent Clint away - but he could help James out, could be around the house and do baby duty and scrub furniture or whatever.

The baby stirred in his arms, restlessly nuzzling against Clint’s shoulder and shifting like he was uncomfortable, so Clint switched him to the other shoulder, moving carefully and trying not to jostle him too much, then bounced him a little with his left arm until he settled again. Look at that, Clint Barton the baby whisperer. Clint snorted to himself. Nate slept on though, nestled against Clint’s chest, a warm and heavy weight.

It was daunting, how much the kid trusted him, how much he’d got attached to Clint over the last couple of months, and Clint had a moment of worrying about what that was going to mean in the long term, then let it go. He was just a baby, and Clint was just helping James out. If the kid was a little bit attached, that was okay, because he’d forget all about it eventually. It wasn’t _permanent_. 

**

James came back downstairs looking marginally more human, his hair a bit of a mess but the bags under his eyes a lot better than they had been. Nathan was awake too, but Clint had managed to find little jars of baby food in the pantry, and he’d sat the kid up in the high chair that Clint vaguely recognized as having seen in the attic before he left, now scrubbed up and polished, and Clint was spooning a turkey and gravy meal into his mouth. 

Nathan was spitting it out about as fast as Clint could manage to get it in there, but he was grinning his wide baby-grin, so Clint couldn’t find it in himself to be too upset about it. 

“What’re you doin’?” James rumbled as he shuffled into the kitchen. “He’s got more on him than in him.”

Clint shrugged. “He seemed hungry and these were in the pantry.”

Snorting, James made his way to the other side of the kitchen, pulling down a can of baby formula and a jug of water, mixing a quick bottle that he ran under hot water in the sink for a minute or two before handing it off to Clint. “Try that.”

Nathan reached out with grabby hands for the bottle as soon as it got within his eyesight, making a kind of high-pitched screech that made Clint want to plug his ears. Clint handed the bottle over and the kid immediately shoved the nipple in his eye, up his nose, and mashed it into the side of his cheek before Clint reached out to help direct it into his mouth, feeling his mouth curl up at the edges. 

“Your aim needs work, kid,” Clint told him. Nathan just suckled contentedly at the bottle as he watched Clint around the edges of it with large, blue-grey eyes. 

Meanwhile, James dumped coffee grounds into the filter and flicked the power button, standing by it listlessly while it hissed and gurgled and spat hot coffee into the pot. 

“Seriously though, are you okay?” Clint asked, cautiously. James looked _better_ , but he still looked worn the fuck out.

“Yes,” James told him, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Just tired.”

“Well, I’m back,” Clint said, unnecessarily, “so you can get a little more sleep, maybe. And I can do stuff around here or whatever. Grocery store. Repairs. So you don’t have to do everything.”

James grunted in vague acknowledgement as he poured himself and Clint a cup of coffee. “I gotta get used to the store sometime,” James pointed out, after he’d had a few sips of coffee. “You’re not always gonna be here.”

Clint shrugged. Fair enough. James was the one living here, after all. And that reminded him-

“What’re you doing for money?” Clint asked, despite knowing it was none of his business but wondering all the same. The house was paid for, free and clear, and Clint had set up the utilities under the same false name as the property, but they were gonna have to figure out the rest. Clint had used up a big chunk of his savings on the truck sitting outside and supplying the house in the first place, and his paycheck with S.H.I.E.L.D. was good enough to keep them fed and clothed, but he didn’t expect that James was going to be okay with that for long - if at all. Clint didn’t mind footing the bill - it wasn’t like he’d been spending his paychecks on much else - but it probably wasn’t going to sit right with James for any length of time. 

“I got some stashed away,” James grunted, and Clint noticed that the weariness he was feeling lent itself to that odd New York, New York accent he’d noticed. The more tired James got, the more drawn out and drawled his words became. “Cleared out a coupla Red Room coffers on my way out. I’ll be alright for a while.” He gave Clint a narrow glance. “I can pay you back for-” he gestured vaguely around them, but Clint shook his head.

“Nah, it’s all good. Was my place to fix up anyway, right? Just didn’t know if I needed to get you a checkbook for my bank account.” Clint chuckled as he said it, but James just watched him with raised eyebrows, like he couldn’t believe what Clint had said. 

There was a strained, awkward silence, and then James said, “I need to go into town anyway, get my own bank account set up, pick up a few things for Nate. I was gonna take him with me but-” he glanced out the window at the swirling winds and the beginnings of a flurry, “-might be easier to leave him here with you?” 

“Yeah, of course!” Clint was quick to agree. “Whatever you need.”

Whatever to keep his mind off of things, and a baby would probably do plenty to keep him busy and occupied while James did whatever it was James did. 

**

They fell into a kind of routine after that, returning naturally to the simple camaraderie they’d developed on the cruise ship and during the weeks before Nat had left. James came back from town with enough groceries to stock the house for a month, and a stack of baby development books, cookbooks, and home repair books. He dove into rampant domesticity with a fervor that Clint neither understood nor felt like he needed to partake in, and instead he just sort of drifted around doing whatever it was that needed doing or whatever it was James _told_ him needed doing. 

Sometimes that was replacing baseboards on the stairs and sometimes it was playing pat-a-cake on the floor with Nathan while James attempted dinner (with mixed success) and sometimes it was getting up before the sun to soothe the baby because James couldn’t get him to stop crying and Clint could. 

Nathan still seemed emotionally attached to Clint to a degree Clint found difficult to understand but couldn’t deny, not when 4am brought tears and wails and heartbroken sobs that woke even Clint up. The first time it’d happened, he’d stumbled out of his bedroom and down the hall to James’, where the former assassin was attempting to comfort the inconsolable baby, and only Clint’s mumbled “you need some help?” had startled Nathan out of the crying fit, and only Clint rocking him quietly had eased him back to sleep. He rocked and patted and sang and soothed, softening his favorite songs into something that sounded vaguely like lullabies as he hummed and murmured them.

The kid didn’t know that _Total Eclipse of the Heart_ wasn’t intended to be a bedtime song as long as Clint sang it softly, though it made James stare at him a bit strangely. 

“I didn’t know you sang,” he said one morning, after Clint had spent what felt like half the night rocking and singing.

“It’s my fifth best skill,” Clint said flippantly, staring at the coffee pot and willing it to brew faster. 

James snorted and let the subject drop, though Clint caught him occasionally humming the songs after that, even when the baby wasn’t fussing. 

So Clint got used to being awake at dawn, guzzling coffee while James caught up on much-needed sleep, early afternoon naps while Nate snoozed on his chest, burned dinners, and bubble baths. The whole thing happened so quickly and so instinctively that it took Clint a full week to realize how startlingly domestic it was. 

He was stretched out on the living room rug with Nathan, letting him bang on a toy xylophone and trying to mimic some of the baby sign language James had insisted was crucial to his verbal development when it suddenly dawned on him that this was a hell of a lot like having a _family_. 

Clint hadn’t ever intended on having that. His own hadn’t been great - his dad was a raging alcoholic and abusive asshole, to say nothing of the brother who’d left him for dead - and the sudden and overwhelming realization that he was getting attached to these two people who were living in his house was almost too much. He froze - hand in the air midway through the sign for “milk” while James stalked around the kitchen with some crappy country music station playing in the background - and had a very mild panic attack. 

He took deep breaths. 

He took a _lot_ of _very_ deep breaths. 

This was fine. 

Sometimes a family was three assassins and a baby, it was _fine_ , it was all fine. 

“Clint?” James said, giving him the grumpy face that Clint was learning translated to _concerned_ rather than _pissed off_.

Hell, James hadn’t even pointed a gun at him once, except for that first day. 

“Yeah?” he croaked.

“What’s with you?” James asked, the trace of an accent coloring his words. And that was another thing - the longer Clint was here, the more relaxed James got, the more his words came out drawled and a little old-fashioned, like something out of an old Hollywood film. It wasn’t just that classic New Yorker accent Clint had first detected, but something even more complex. Unfamiliar slang and dropped vowels and something that made Clint think of Dick Tracey movies. It was simultaneously soothing and unnerving, because it didn’t fit at all with what Clint knew of James’ history. The Brooklyn accent was bad enough, but the cadence and verbiage weren’t quite right, and none of it made a damn bit of sense. 

“Nothin’,” Clint managed, dropping his hand and looking down at Nathan, picking up the little wooden hammer that went with the xylophone. “Just thinkin’.” 

James snorted. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he warned, turning back to the stove. 

Clint rolled his eyes. “Hey,” he said, after a minute of internal debate, “can I ask you something?”

James shoulders went tense over the stove, hunched up and stiff, but he nodded.

“Where’d you even find a baby?” Clint asked, making faces at Nathan, careful to keep his voice casual. “I mean not where you _found_ him, I know you got him from the Red Room or whatever, but like… what’s the deal with the kid?”

James let out a sigh, deep and miserable, and Clint almost retracted the question.

Except-

Except that Clint was risking a lot, here, and it wasn’t that James owed him a full explanation, but Clint thought he could at least tell him _something_. 

For fuck’s sake, he was hiding an internationally wanted assassin and a baby in his childhood home. 

“You don’t owe me anything,” Clint told him quietly, after the silence got drawn out enough that Clint figured he wasn’t going to answer anyway. “But I’m just curious where the Red Room got a baby and why they’d even want one.”

“The Red Room has trained children for years,” James hedged, not turning to meet Clint’s gaze. “They pull the ones with ‘aptitude’-” he said the word almost sarcastically- “and put them in ‘scholarship’ schools to funnel them into whatever programs they would be most useful in. That’s how Natalia was recruited - she ‘showed promise’ and they took her and trained her and _molded_ her into whatever they wanted.”

Clint swallowed roughly. He could see it - had _experienced_ it, in fact, albeit not quite the same way. It wasn’t that much different from what Trickshot had done to him; seen a talent for the bow that he’d bent and twisted to his own means until Clint had finally found a line he couldn’t cross.

Then S.H.I.E.L.D had crossed it for him.

Still, that wasn’t the same as a _baby_. Babies were a lot of work, which he’d objectively known and was currently getting a crash course education in. They needed attention and care and to be taught the most basic of tasks. It was a different thing entirely from finding a school-aged child and training them to throw knives or shoot guns or whatever else they’d done. 

“So what,” Clint asked, “they take babies from parents or… what, orphanages? And turn them into assassins?” There were loads of orphanages in Russia, he knew. Hundreds of babies that went unnoticed and neglected, not nearly enough caregivers to provide the attention a baby needed. One or two disappearing would not only go unnoticed, but might even be a relief. Someone who came in with the right credentials and a semi-plausible story could probably even take a baby legally, then just disappear from the system.

There was a long, loaded silence. Clint felt like he was close but not quite on the mark for whatever it was James was edging around, whatever the truth was that he didn’t necessarily want Clint to know but wasn’t quite prepared to lie to him about. 

“He’s not just any baby,” James finally sighed, still hunched over the stove. He didn’t turn to meet Clint’s gaze, just slowly stirred the pot that held whatever was going to be for dinner and answered Clint in careful measured tones. “They didn’t _get_ him,” he said, “they _made_ him.”

Nathan reached out and wrestled the hammer out of Clint’s hand, deciding to bang on the xylophone keys himself since Clint had stopped, oblivious to the tension in the room 

“What do you mean _made_ him?”

James paused. “You ever heard about Dolly the sheep?”

Clint blinked in surprise. “The one they cloned a couple of years ago?”

“...yeah,” James grunted, sounding bitter and frustrated. “That’s the one.” 

It took Clint a second but-

“Are you saying Nate’s a _clone_?!” He asked, disbelief warring with the part of him that pointed out how much more sense that made than anything he could’ve come up with. Scientists had assured the general public that they were years to decades from cloning a human, nevermind the ethical implications of such. Dolly the sheep had been a hotly contested scientific advancement, and Clint didn’t think he’d heard anything else about cloning since then.

Obviously Red Room didn’t have anything in the way of ethical or moral compunctions about anything, so cloning wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, if they could pull it off. And it certainly appeared that they had. 

Nathan looked _so much_ like James. It could be coincidence - he was caucasian with brown hair and blue eyes, it wasn’t that unusual - but the particular shade of slate grey that Nate and James shared was one Clint hadn’t seen often or maybe ever before, and there were other things too. The slope of Nate’s nose and the stubborn look on his face when he wanted something he couldn’t have, so reminiscent of the way James looked. 

It was _impossible_ , except for how it sort of wasn’t. 

“Why rely on a soldier you can barely control when you can raise one from infancy to be completely under your influence?” James asked, sounding bitter and small in a way Clint had never heard before. 

It took Clint a second to parse all of that out but-

“What do you mean by ‘control’?” Clint asked, feeling his brow scrunch up in confusion. He felt like a simple question had opened up a can of venomous snakes rather than just worms, and he was getting a lot more than he’d bargained for. James had been a Red Room operative, Clint knew that, the same as Natasha. But they’d _defected_ , they’d rescued a _baby_ , there wasn’t-

James blew out an explosive breath. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t- I remember things, sometimes. Bits and pieces. I wasn’t always an assassin, an _Asset_. The _Soldat._ I was… a person, once. Someone they found and trained and controlled by whatever means necessary, and after awhile it wasn’t worth the effort to resist. Not until _him_.” He cocked his head towards the baby that was now gnawing on the wooden handle of the hammer, watching Clint with wide grey eyes. 

“He’s worth a lot of effort,” Clint agreed, not thinking about the way this could all end badly for him, the way he was hiding a defected Russian KGB agent and a baby that technically didn’t exist. Not thinking about the fact that he wouldn’t so much as face a trial if S.H.I.E.L.D found out what he was doing. He’d be buried _under_ the base at best, more likely he’d be sent on a suicide mission and eliminated by ‘friendly’ fire. He didn’t want to think about how this was going to change his life forever. 

It wasn’t like Clint hadn’t realized that before he’d brought James and Natasha here, before he’d agreed to help them. It was just that it was so much more than he had even guessed at with James’ new revelations, and it was overwhelming and impossible. 

Clint had just been thinking about how this was _family_ , and James’ revelation did nothing at all to change that. If anything, it made Clint _more_ determined, _more_ ridiculously protective of this little safe haven. He was so compromised that he ought to take _himself_ out back to be shot, or at least directly to Coulson to confess the whole thing, but watching Nate play with simple toys on the floor and grin up at Clint in complete trust only ensured that Clint would never, ever do such a thing. Even if S.H.I.E.L.D. were the good guys, there was no way they were going to pass up the chance to study a fully-cloned human baby, especially one cloned from one of the most infamous assassins of the century.

James finally met Clint’s eyes, his gaze searching as he looked and probably seeing a lot more than Clint was comfortable with, but Clint met his stare evenly. He was already in this, already invested, already committed. They were living in his house, he’d lied to his superiors, he’d taken Natasha to whatever fate awaited her. He wasn’t going to turn a baby - cloned or not - in to S.H.I.E.L.D. for experiments and blood draws and observation that would likely be better than what the Red Room had planned, but only marginally. There was no chance a kid brought up like that would live anything close to a normal life.

Nate deserved a normal life.

He deserved the kind of life Clint had never had, that Natasha had never gotten. That James was desperately trying to provide. 

“It’s okay,” Clint said softly. “He’s safe here, I promise. You’re safe here.”

The look James gave him was bleak, somehow the opposite of what Clint had wanted him to feel despite the sincerity of his words. James looked at him for an endless moment, emotions shifting behind his eyes much too fast for Clint to follow, and then he stalked out of the room without a word.

He was gone so long that Clint began to think he wasn’t coming back, that he’d so offended James with his statement that he’d had to walk away entirely to cool off. Clint got up from the floor after a little while to stir whatever was in the pot - beef stew from the looks of it - and checked on the bread that was in the oven, pulling it out in time to keep the crust just this side of pleasantly brown. 

When James finally returned, he had a manilla file folder that was a solid inch thick, creased and worn with rust-colored stains that Clint hoped weren’t blood but deeply suspected they were. James handed Clint the folder and scooped Nate up off of the floor to deposit him in the high chair. 

“You can tell me how safe we are when you’ve read that,” James told him, almost belligerent. Like he was daring Clint to tell him differently. 

Dinner was a silent, stilted affair, except for Nate’s burbles and babbling and the sound of his hands smacking the high chair tray as he played in his food like finger paint. James eventually deemed him done, wiping his face and hands and chair down with a damp cloth and then toting him upstairs without another word to Clint. 

Clint finished his bowl of stew, rinsed it out, and put the remaining stew into a container in the fridge to be eaten later. He slowly and methodically cleaned up the kitchen, wiping the stove and counter and hand-washing the dishes, all the while knowing he was deliberately avoiding the worn manilla file on the table that was practically calling his name. Clint had never been much of one for after-dinner clean up, even if he hadn’t done the cooking.

After he had procrastinated as much as he reasonably could, Clint finally sat down at the kitchen table and flipped the folder open with trepidation. Absolutely nothing good could be inside, and he dreaded the knowledge it contained. 

The first page was in Cyrillic, indecipherable to Clint, who spoke passable Russian but didn’t read a word of it, although that didn’t matter, because on the left hand side of the file was a large photo of James in a metal tube paperclipped to the file, and in the bottom right-hand corner was a smaller, more formal picture in black and white. 

It was a photo Clint hazily recalled from his junior high history book, of a man that had been dead for at least fifty years. A man that looked identical to James in every way, except that James was missing the crooked smile and laugh lines around his eyes - replaced instead by the kinds of creases that were carved by pain, by a perpetual scowl that hid discomfort and unease and suspicion. 

James’ name really was James Barnes. Clint rested his forehead in his hands as he stared at photographic evidence of the impossible.

James was James Buchanan Barnes, and he’d died falling off a train fifty years ago.

Except for how he apparently hadn’t. 


	2. Chapter 2

Clint eventually resorted to the slow, dial-up internet to help him translate some of the file, waiting impatiently for Alta-Vista to crawl through the internet and squinting and searing neon words typed against black backgrounds. He could read the English, obviously, and the German, but the Cyrillic was impossible, and what little bit he typed into the search engine only made him hesitant to look up more. It consisted of bone-chilling Russian descriptions, most of them medical terms, and brutal-sounding enough that Clint didn’t want to attract any government attention by doing too much digging.

The German and English bits were enough, anyway, for Clint to get the general picture. 

It was gruesome. 

James Barnes’ capture at Azzano had involved more than just a work camp, there had been experiments and drugs - something that was redacted from the American files Clint had access to, but which was clearly described in the files of someone called Zola. James Barnes had been given some kind of experimental serum - something similar to that which had created Captain America - but which was never fully tested. 

Until James Barnes fell off a train and was discovered by Nazi soldiers. 

He’d been missing part of his arm, but that hadn’t stopped Zola, who had been working on exoskeleton battle armor long before his foray into super soldier serum. 

Clint figured the damning ‘H’ on his dog tags hadn’t done him any favors. He was pretty sure he remembered hearing that a lot of soldiers in WWII had marked other religions - like Catholic - or even ‘none’ to avoid being identified as Jewish if they were captured. 

The entire file was grotesque, but the very beginning was arguably the worst. Either that, or Clint became desensitized after a while, but he doubted it. At some points he broke out into a cold sweat, had to breathe heavily though his nose and swallow hard against his gag reflex. The things that had been done to James ‘Bucky’ Barnes were inhumane, torturous, and deranged. And once they’d grafted a new arm to his unwilling body and tried to torture him into compliance - including showing him the unfortunately-true news that Captain America, Steve Rogers, his closest friend in the world was dead - even then he wouldn’t succumb to their wishes.

Then, they’d invented the chair.

Clint didn’t really understand the complex explanations behind the technology - something about electricity and electroconvulsive therapy, invented in 1938 for treating mental disorders but twisted and bastardized by Hydra into some kind of brainwashing technique. 

They’d brutally erased Bucky Barnes and replaced him with the Winter Soldier - a blank slate, trained and forced into the work of a killer and an assassin. 

Every so often they’d meet resistance - if they went too long without a ‘treatment’ in the chair, or if something happened that triggered a memory - and over time they worked out a more extensive brainwashing system of trigger words and electric shocks, until almost nothing of James Barnes remained. And when he’d started to age, when his cells had shown signs of regenerative slow down, someone had invented cryostasis, and they’d started freezing him between missions.

Clint thought he was going to be sick. 

He had to get up and walk away from the folder numerous times, even just the parts he could read. He dug a dusty bottle of whiskey out of the top of the pantry - hell, it was so old his mom had probably hidden it from his dad - and poured himself two fingers over ice and drank it with shaking hands. 

There was nothing - _nothing_ \- that justified or excused any of this. There was no one on earth who deserved the kind of treatment James had suffered, and there was absolutely nothing Clint could do about it. 

He sat back down at the table and continued reading. 

They’d pulled James out for high-level assassinations, destabilizing missions, the occasional training exercise, or just as technology advanced and they needed to ensure their personal assassin was in good working order. 

Then Hydra had morphed, shifted and changed, and James had somehow come into the possession of the Red Room. Clint couldn’t read most of that part - it was in Cyrillic again, but the pages were also damaged and smeared - and then he’d been tasked with training the most promising candidates of the Black Widow program. Natasha - Natalia then, when she had a name at all - among them, the best and brightest of all the students. James worked with the girls for short durations - a few months at most - before going back into cryostasis for a few months or a couple of years, then coming back out.

Graduation from the Black Widow program apparently entailed successfully performing a high level assassination before the Winter Soldier got to the target. 

Only a handful of girls made it.

No mention was made of what happened to the others, but Clint could guess.

James went into cryostasis again for a long time after that - several years - because the Black Widows were raised to be entirely loyal to the Red Room, requiring neither ‘recalibration’ in the chair nor trigger words to cooperate. He was brought out only once during that time, for a joint mission with Natasha which was heavily redacted, even in the file James had apparently stolen. It had resulted in severe injury to James for reasons that Clint couldn’t decipher, and he was again put in cryo. 

Then came Dolly the sheep, and after that, Nathan. 

They’d pulled James out of cryo for that too, though the reasons weren’t entirely clear as to why, except perhaps that they’d wanted to compare the copy to the original. 

The final pages of the file were excited observations about Nathan’s growth and development, speculation about whether the super soldier serum James had received had affected his DNA enough to be an influencing factor on the ‘subject’ - no name was ever assigned. There was mention of previous failed experiments that made Clint’s stomach turn, to know that there had been others, perhaps. More babies with Nathan’s toothless grin and grey gaze. 

Clint closed the folder with a heavy, sick feeling in his chest. He left it on the table - it wasn’t a secret anymore, after all. Natasha had obviously known, and James had lived it. So he left the folder exactly where James had given it to him and then trudged up the stairs to his room. He lay in bed, staring at the dark ceiling and the shadows on the wall for a long, long time.

**

When Clint got back to the house after his errand, the file that had been on the middle of the table was gone, James was quietly drinking coffee at the table and looking bleak, while Nathan was on the floor gnawing on a toy Clint sincerely hoped didn’t have any small parts. James looked at him in frank surprise, like he hadn’t been sure Clint was coming back, and it occurred to Clint that he maybe should have left a note. 

Instead, he dropped a manilla file on the table in front of James and went to pour himself his own cup of coffee. He pointedly didn’t watch James open the folder or read the contents, but he could hear the whispery sounds of papers sliding together as James flipped through them.

“You put my name on the deed?” James asked after a few moments, disbelief clear in his voice. 

Clint shrugged uncomfortably, scratching at the back of his neck. “Wasn’t _my_ name on the deed anyway,” Clint admitted. “It was a fake name, same as half my shit. Keeps S.H.I.E.L.D. outta it, which is good for you, yeah? They can’t find what they don’t know to look for.”

James squinted at him, clearly suspicious. This was obviously not the reaction he’d expected from the revelations of the night before. What little sleep Clint had got had been plagued with nightmares, so eventually he’d got up with the sun and took the deed and his fake identification into town, and signed the whole house and property over to James as soon as the courthouse opened. Clint couldn’t fix all the horrible shit that had happened to James, but he could sure as hell make sure he had a safe place to be, unbothered by the government and S.H.I.E.L.D and even Clint, if he wanted.

“Why’ve you got a house that’s secret from S.H.I.E.L.D.?”

And wasn’t that a good question. Clint didn’t have a good answer for it though, other than an innate distrust borne of years of experience with being fucked over by anyone and everyone. 

“Well it’s lucky for you I have,” Clint said, instead of answering him. “Because now _you’ve_ got a secret house from S.H.I.E.L.D. You and Nathan. And Natasha, if she wants it.”

James was still staring at him, like he was waiting for the punchline, or the other shoe to drop. “I don’t get it,” he admitted, finally. “All the- after everything I’ve done, why would you-”

It took Clint a second to catch on, a moment of plain and frank confusion, before he realized that James held himself responsible for all the horrible shit in that file. That he honestly believed it was his own fault, that he’d done something _wrong_. 

James didn’t believe that he’d been _done_ wrong. He didn’t look at all the fucked up shit Hydra and Red Room and whoever else had done _to_ him and thought ‘I didn’t deserve that’ - James thought that, somehow, it was his fault. 

“What you did,” Clint said slowly, trying for once in his life to choose his words carefully. “That wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.”

“I know,” James said, and he glanced over his shoulder at Nathan, who was happily banging wooden blocks together on the floor. “But I did it.”

Clint shook his head. “Look,” he said, trying not to let the frustration crawl out his chest and up his throat and into his words. “What happened to you - you didn’t deserve that. Whatever you did - I don’t care. I’ve done some fucked up shit too, okay, and I didn’t have half the- the incentive, if you wanna call it that, that you did. But you’ve got that kid and he needs you. And you deserve whatever quiet life you can carve out for him and for yourself. So the house is yours. No one’s gonna look for you in goddamn Iowa. So long as you keep your arm covered up you’ve got good enough identification to live here as long as you want. Build a life, raise a kid. The house’s yours, free and clear. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. I’ll go away and never come back and I won’t tell a soul you’re here because _that’s what you deserve_ ,” Clint spoke over James’ attempts to interrupt him. “That’s what Nate deserves. Whatever you want, I’ll make it happen if I can. Live your _life_ James,” Clint told him, fiercely. 

Somehow in the long hours of reading that file and the longer hours of lying awake and thinking about it, Clint had grown savagely, doggedly protective of both James and Nathan. He’d never had a functional family of his own - he’d only lived in this house until about the third grade and even then it hadn’t been what anyone would have considered a healthy environment - and after that it had been foster homes and then the circus and then life as a criminal and finally S.H.I.E.L.D. But none of that was _family_. James had a chance, here, to build the kind of life Clint had never had, the kind of life that Nate deserved, and if Clint could hand it over on a silver platter then that’s what he was gonna do. 

“If you wanna go get tattooed and pierced and play in a shitty band in a bar or go back to school or hack the government and steal yourself a sizeable fortune - do whatever you want. No one will hear about you from me. Natasha can come as much as she wants, and I’ll stay away from all of you, for as long as you like. Forever, even. Whatever you need. Whatever you _want._ ”

There was a long moment of silence as James stared at Clint in disbelief, the papers to the house still clutched in his hand. Nathan banged on behind them, oblivious to the tension in the room, crawling into the cardboard box Clint had only yesterday cut into the semblance of a house, complete with little windows. He peeked out of one now, giggling at the two of them. 

“It’s your house too,” James managed, finally, his voice like gravel. “Or it was.”

Clint stiffened up. He’d brought James and Natasha here, but he’d never really explained what the house was to him or why he’d bought it. 

“Well,” Clint said blithely, “it’s yours now, for whatever you want it for. Get a dog, get some chickens, hell - get some goats. Plant something if you want. I think we used to grow soybeans in the east fields.”

“That’s not what I meant,” James growled, finally shaking off some of his stupor. “I mean it’s your house now, as much as it’s mine. I don’t want you to go, and I don’t think you want to go either. But I also meant I know this was your house, a long time ago. When you were a kid. I found,” he cleared his throat, like he’d suddenly realized he might be about to cross a line, “I found some photo albums in the attic when I cleared it out. Recognized your face.”

Clint had a heart-stopping moment of fear mixed with fury. Resented the invasion of his privacy, the fact that his history in this house had been unearthed without his permission, that he’d have to talk about it, have to _explain_ what it was like to grow up here with a brother who was halfway to becoming just like their deadbeat dad by the time he was ten and a mother who was terrified to speak up. What it was like to have his hearing half beat out of him for whatever perceived slight he’d managed to stumble onto that day, something that had taken years to heal up enough that Clint mostly didn’t notice the slight residual loss. What it meant when their parents died and Clint and Barney joined the most crooked circus in existence, even though it’d taken even more years for Clint to realize that. 

And then all the fight drained out of him, because he knew all of that and more about James. He’d seen medical records and training records, and photographs of gruesome procedures and less gruesome but somehow more invasive shots of James sedated, the closest thing to rest he’d had in 50 years. 

He owed James at least this much explanation, after all that James had bared to him. 

“Yeah,” he said, finally. “Yeah, it was my house, a long time ago. I don’t think it was ever my _home_.” Clint wasn’t sure he’d ever had a home, come to that, as much as he’d had a collection of places he’d lived and people he’d known. He and Barney had cycled through foster care for a couple of years before they’d run away together and none of that had felt like home either. 

Clint wasn’t sure he really knew what home felt like. 

He cleared his throat, trying to scrape out the thickness he felt there. “My dad was drunk most of the time and a bastard all of the time, and at the moment I can’t think of a single, solitary memory in this house that isn’t tainted.” He could remember his mother’s perfume and the smell of potatoes frying and the way it had felt to climb the tree in the backyard and hide high in the branches, but all of it was soured with the stench of whiskey-drenched breath and a man that Clint suspected he’d now tower over but still cower in front of yelling at all of them for being useless, lazy, and stupid. 

“I don’t even know why I bought it,” Clint admitted. “I saw in the paper that it was up for foreclosure, and I had some cash leftover from my last job before S.H.I.E.L.D. caught up with me, so I paid for it outright at auction. I didn’t do it out of some misguided sense of nostalgia or whatever, I did it on a whim.” He glanced around the room, which was as clean as it’d ever been, and his eyes landed on the recliner that, even now, he avoided like the plague. A distant part of him wondered if it still smelled like cigarettes and beer. “I’m glad I did, because now you have somewhere to go,” Clint said, turning back to James. “Somewhere to be safe.”

James looked at him for a long, long moment. It was the kind of intense scrutiny that Clint had never liked, had always deflected with a joke or a comment or a snide remark, but instead he stood still and let James look. “It can be a safe place for you too,” James said finally, like he’d measured Clint up and decided he was worth it.

The only person who’d ever done that before was Phil. 

Clint swallowed hard. 

“Somewhere S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t know about,” he continued, “for me and Nate and Natasha and _you_.” 

When Clint didn’t answer, James gave him another evaluating look, this one less weighted and more considering. “I want it to be somewhere you feel safe,” James told him eventually, something soft in the way he said it that Clint had never heard before. “What would make it better?”

Involuntarily, Clint’s eyes flicked to the recliner again and away, but he couldn’t make himself answer for a long moment. He glanced around the rest of the open living area of the house, taking in the wallpaper his mom had put up to match the pattern of the dishes, and the way the house hadn’t changed a bit in twenty years. “It looks just the same as it always did,” Clint croaked, shrugging. “Just reminds me of… everything.” 

Until James had asked, Clint hadn’t realized he’d spent the whole time he was here half-expecting his father to come around the corner bellowing, or hear the sharp snap of a leather belt. 

“Easy enough,” James told him with absolute certainty. 

**

When Clint got up the next morning the recliner was gone, a slightly less-worn patch of hardwood underneath it the only evidence it had ever been there. James was gone in the truck as well, and Nate with him, so Clint had the creaky old house to himself for the first time since he’d got back. He puttered around in the kitchen a little, making coffee and toast and listening to the silence that was broken only by the sound of the winter wind whistling around the house. It was deceptively bright and sunny outside, like a bright spring day except for the frigid temperature, and Clint stayed carefully inside, huddled up in sweats and thick socks and nursing the entire pot of coffee before James returned. 

When he got back - Nate bundled up in some kind of fluffy bear bunting suit - the back of the truck was lumpy and covered with a blue tarpaulin. 

“Good, you’re up,” James grunted. “Lemme get Nate down for a nap and then you can help me.”

“Sure,” Clint said, blinking up at him in confusion. In the time Clint had been back from New York it wasn’t like he’d spent a lot of time laying around in bed, though to be fair that was his natural inclination. “You want me to unload the truck?” he asked. 

James gave him a scrunched-up look and then shook his head. “Actually, can you get him ready for a nap and I’ll start on the truck?”

Clint shrugged and took the squirming baby, unzipping him from the bear suit and smoothing his hair back down where it was staticky and sweaty. “Are you overdressed for the weather?” Clint cooed at him, falling into the baby-talk he’d naturally picked up from spending so much time with the kid. Apparently baby-talk was an evolutionary adaptation or some such nonsense, according to one of the score of books James had brought to the house, something humans couldn’t help but engage in. Clint certainly hadn’t been exempt. “Are you a hot and sweaty chub monster?”

Nathan giggled up at him as Clint freed his arms and legs from the confines of the suit. Underneath he was wearing at least two pairs of socks and the baby equivalent of a sweatsuit. Jesus Christ, was James trying to give him a heatstroke? Clint pulled off the extra socks and the shirt as well, leaving him in cotton shirtsleeves. When Clint picked him up, his diaper didn’t have the sodden feeling he’d come to associate with needing a change, and he didn’t smell either, so Clint went ahead and hauled him upstairs, humming _Private Eyes_ under his breath as he went. 

It only took about five minutes or so of swaying and humming before Nathan was out, Clint settling him into the little bassinet that James had wedged between the bed and the wall to prevent it swaying. 

By the time he got back downstairs, James had already hauled in a whole load of things from the local hardware store, bags with handles sticking out of them and cans of paint and some kind of machine that looked like a smaller, denser vacuum cleaner with a weird square head. 

“What the hell is all this?” Clint asked, looking around as James came in with another two armloads of stuff. 

James grunted as he sat it down. “We’re redecorating.”

“We’re doing what now?” Clint asked, eyebrows climbing up to his hairline. 

“Baby book says Nathan is too old for a bassinet, it’s dangerous, so we gotta get him a real bed and room sorted out, so I got stuff for that. There’s a crib in the back of the truck. But I figured if we were gonna do his room, we might as well do everything else too.”

Looking at the pile of stuff, Clint could easily imagine they were going to do _everything_ else. He didn’t know what half the shit he was looking at was even _for_. Why did they need a new vacuum? 

“Come help me get the couch,” James said, stomping back out.

“Couch?” Clint asked, bewildered as he stuffed his feet into boots. “What couch?”

The couch, it turned out, was some gently used, pale blue, skirted thing James had got from god-only-knew-where, but it was better than the floral monstrosity his mother had had in the living room for as long as Clint could remember. Unfortunately they didn’t quite think through the logistics of moving it all, and they ended up having to take the couch back _out_ of the living room in order to swap the two pieces out. He and James hauled the old couch out to the barn, where James basically strong-armed it up to Clint in the loft and then followed him up in order to arrange it against the wall, creating an almost-cozy area someone could retreat to in the cool, dim interior. 

“So,” Clint asked, as they trudged back across the property to the house, “is it just the arm that’s super-strong, or the whole package?”

James went tense across the shoulders, then sighed heavily. Clint had read the file, had seen the notes on increased speed, healing, dexterity, but watching James single-handedly _lift_ an entire sofa with Clint (who was no weakling himself) there as a guide because it was simply unwieldy to swing a couch around alone, had really hammered the point home in a way reading the words simply couldn’t. 

“It’s part of the deal,” James said, sort of quiet like he expected Clint to complain.

“Cool,” Clint said, as casual as he could make it. “Guess that means you’re doing all the heavy lifting from now on,” he added, turning to grin at James across the snow-crusted landscape. 

James’ answering smile was a little hesitant but genuine.

Back inside, James insisted on sweeping the floor underneath where the couch had been before they went and unloaded everything, some of it for the second time. Besides the couch, there was also a new recliner which wasn’t part of a matching set but still somehow worked, in off-white upholstery with a wooden handle - along with the honey-colored crib James had got for Nate. 

“Where’d you get all this stuff anyway?” Clint huffed as they settled the recliner into place. It was heavier than he’d expected, and even with James doing most of the lifting, the actual maneuvering was a bit of a hassle, considering they hadn’t thought to clear a path from the door to the living room. 

“Second-hand furniture shop,” James grunted, wiping his forehead. “It’s all floor model stuff they didn’t sell, I think,” he added. “Okay we gotta clean out that extra room for Nate and he’s gonna be awake in like half an hour.”

Clint sighed. That bedroom was full of what amounted to trash and he was not excited to clean it out, but a small part of him was thrilled at the idea of just throwing all the detritus of his shitty childhood away, so he cracked his back and followed James up the stairs. The roll-top desk and almost everything else in the room was headed directly for the burn pile or the trash pick-up, but there were a few things worth salvaging. James unearthed a small bookshelf that he set aside to be cleaned up and re-purposed for Nate’s room, along with a round table that James deemed suitable for going next to the new recliner, and a TV stand that had probably been modern and new before Clint was born but now just looked dated.

“We can paint it,” James said, when Clint gave him a skeptical look. 

Clint shrugged. It didn’t matter to him much, really, and he was finding the fun of _throwing shit away_ was pretty cathartic. 

He wouldn’t miss any of it. 

When the room was empty James hauled their usual vacuum cleaner upstairs and set to cleaning up the truly horrific carpet in the room. After three passes, Clint finally felt like he had to speak up.

“I don’t think it’s gonna get any better,” he said, nose scrunched at the persistent smell of dust. He glanced at the hideous pattern of the carpet and the equally-hideous mustard yellow color of the walls. “Are we gonna paint?”

James looked disgruntled that just vacuuming the carpet hadn’t been enough to get several decades’ worth of dirt and dust out of it, but he conceded defeat, wrapping the cord to the machine up neatly. “Yeah,” he said, putting a hand on his hip as he looked around. “I got a bluish-green color for in here. That should be okay, right?”

Clint snorted. “I was basically raised in the circus, you think I’ve got any sense for interior decorating? As far as I’m concerned, everything should be purple. But I’ve done a fair amount of painting for stages and stuff, and we might as well paint the room first and _then_ rip the carpet out. It’ll save us the trouble of putting drop sheets down.”

James shrugged, then walked to the doorway, where the carpet was tacked down before it transitioned to the hardwood floor of the stairs and hallway. He ripped up the brass tacking strip with his metal hand and then pulled the carpet away to look underneath. From what Clint could tell, the same wood that was in the hallway flowed into the bedroom, though it looked slightly less worse-for-wear since it hadn’t got the foot traffic the hall did. “That’ll work,” James admitted, glancing around the room again. 

It was far from done, but it was empty and ready to be made into something new.

The whole house felt a bit like it was waiting to be transformed, in fact, and the thought sat warm and hopeful in Clint’s chest before he shoved it down where he would think about it approximately never.

Down the hall, Nathan began babbling to himself as he always did when he woke up, now that Clint had been back for over a week and they were settling into a routine of baths and bedtimes and naps that seemed to suit him. 

“Flip you for it,” Clint told James, grinning.

“For which?” James asked with a snort. “The painting or the kid?”

“The kid,” Clint was quick to decide. James rolled his eyes and went downstairs to get buckets of paint and supplies instead of arguing the point.

A couple of hours later they ended up having to swap anyway, because it became glaringly obvious that James had never painted a single thing in his entire admittedly-long life. The paint was streaked with roller marks and the mustard color shone through in several places. It was making him grumpy and frustrated, so Clint handed the kid over and took the roller, eyeing the room mistrustfully. At least one wall was nearly dry, so Clint started there, rolling paint on in long, even strokes, clearly more easily able to reach the top of the wall than James had been, though he’d at least been able to tape the ceiling well enough. It took him another two hours, but when he was done there was some satisfaction to be had in how much cleaner and brighter the room looked, just with a few coats of paint. 

Clint cracked open the window in the room to let the smell of paint dissipate and headed back downstairs.

“All done!” he announced, plodding into the living room. 

“You need a shower,” James pointed out, and Clint glanced down at himself. He was covered in flecks of paint that the cans had announced was _Aquitaine_ , from his shirt to his jeans to his skin, and as good as it had looked on the walls, it didn’t look as great all over _him_. 

“Aw, paint, no,” Clint groaned. 

“It’s fine,” James told him. “It’s water-based, it’ll wash out. Give ‘em to me, I’ll throw them in now. And then we can eat.”

Whatever James was experimenting with food-wise smelled good, and Clint’s stomach rumbled. Decision made, he yanked his t-shirt over his head and handed it to James, who grabbed it at the last second, as though he hadn’t expected Clint to strip down in the living room. Oh well, Clint figured, reaching for the button on his pants. He dropped his jeans on the floor and hopped on one foot at a time to yank his socks off before bundling them together and shoving those at James too. He hustled up the stairs to the bathroom, the house colder in nothing but his underwear and ignoring the strange look James was giving him. He didn’t have enough clothes to ruin with paint, even if these weren’t his best jeans, and even if he didn’t have a habit of ruining clothes with other things. Coffee stains were one thing, sea-blue paint another. 

It took another full day of work on their parts, including James cursing as he assembled the crib, found he’d put the drop side on backwards, and then had to disassemble and reassemble it, but in the end the room seemed completely new. The walls dried to an even color, overlooking a few splashes of paint on the window trim and a bit on the ceiling, James had found a rug for the floor at the same second-hand furniture shop, and the little shelf he’d rescued was in a corner of the room full of children’s books.

Clint couldn’t help but be a little proud of how it’d turned out, even though James had truthfully done most of the planning and execution. 

“Alright,” James said, turning to Clint the first night they managed to get Nathan into the crib to sleep successfully, “your room next.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noted some additional tags with this chapter, including 'Jewish Bucky' - I am doing my utmost to be sensitive, respectful, and accurate in my representation. This is a more culturally Jewish representation than a religious one, and it's one that is still finding the way. I have gotten sensitivity reading and asked for input, but if I have - or if I ever - grossly misinterpret something crucially important, please let me know. 
> 
> Additionally I was asked to tag for medical experimentation and mentions of the Holocaust and have done so. As always, if you ever feel I need additional tags, please don't hesitate to let me know, I will happily add them.

“Hey so,” Clint began, carefully concentrating his gaze on Nate and not on James, who he could sense was only kind of listening to him - he was used to Clint’s rambling by now. “I have a question. Or an idea.”

James hummed inquisitively without looking up from his book. They were sitting in the newly-repainted living room, a fire crackling in the fireplace, and it had all been so very peaceful right up until Clint had opened his mouth. 

The whole house felt more peaceful these days, most probably owing to the fact that when James had decided he was going to redecorate, he really meant it. No room in the house had been left untouched as far as Clint could tell, except the attic and the basement, and it was amazing how different some fresh paint and secondhand furniture could make a place feel. Clint barely recognized it. The living room was now off-white, reflecting the lamps and firelight to make it seem bright and open, and the kitchen felt completely different with the wallpaper gone and the walls a pale sage. Clint’s back and shoulders might never be the same after using the wallpaper steamer though - the weird machine hadn’t been a vacuum after all - and scraping the decades-old fruit pattern off the walls. The bathroom was still tiny with hideous tile on the floor, but James had painted it the color of coffee with plenty of cream and scoured the glass shower door until Clint could see through it again, and the end result was enough to make Clint feel like he could relax into what James had promised he could have - safety. 

Clint had promised it to James and now James was giving it back to him. 

The most surprising thing in the week-long, unending list of renovation had been James’ determination to make Clint’s room into something he could not only live with but wanted to spend time in. Gone were the final fragments of his childhood, and instead James had brought home a greyish-purple paint called _Purple Haze_ for the walls and a larger bed that actually meant Clint’s feet didn’t hang off the end, along with a rug and some kind of weird abstract art thing that looked vaguely like targets if you squinted at it hard enough. It gave Clint squirmy feelings in his gut that he carefully did not examine.

By mutual unspoken agreement, the only room they hadn’t changed was Natasha’s, though James had picked out paint for that room too, something creamy and yellow-tinted, and stuck the cans inside for her approval when she came home.

Clint very carefully did not think of it as _if_ she came home. 

But he was getting sidetracked. “Christmas is coming up,” Clint said hesitantly, “and um, so is Hanukkah. I didn’t know- it’s only a coupla weeks until Christmas and a few days until Hanukkah and I wasn’t sure if you wanted to do something for that?”

James sat his book aside and gave Clint an indecipherable look. 

“I saw the ‘H’ on your dogtags,” Clint said quietly. “In the file. If you wanted-”

“I don’t remember enough about who I was before the _Soldat_ to know anything about that,” he told Clint harshly, though it didn’t seem like he was mad at Clint for bringing it up so much as he was frustrated with the whole situation. 

Clint shrugged. “We don’t have to do anything,” he assured James. “It’s just that, well, I think it’d be… nice? For Nathan. If we did something. His first Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Chrismukkah?” 

James gave him an uncertain look. 

“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” Clint told him. “Lotsa people celebrate Christmas and aren’t religious at all, they just like Santa and presents. But-” he swallowed hard, glancing over at Nathan again, “if you wanted to take something back, if you wanted to take _that_ back, you could do that too. It’s your life, you can do whatever you want.”

He was going to tell James he could do whatever he wanted until the message sunk in or he was out of voice, Clint figured.

“Kids should have good memories,” Clint said softly. “Things they can look back on and remember that are _good_.”

Nathan was pulling himself up on the wooden coffee table that had appeared in the living room sometime in the last couple of days, bending his knees and bouncing, a stream of burbling coming out of his mouth as he tried to reach a toy that was just past his fingertips. Clint didn’t know if babies his age - just about 8 months now - were supposed to be doing all that, but he seemed alright, so he didn’t dwell on it too much. James looked over at Nathan, his face creasing up in a reluctant smile when the kid shrieked like he was mortally offended that the toy was out of his reach. 

Clint wanted Nathan to have as normal a childhood as possible, and he was willing to do pretty much anything that meant he’d get it. Clint wanted him to have holidays and school days and birthdays, pets and friends and toys, and even the more mundane parts like chores and vegetables he didn’t want to eat. There was a list on the fridge, one James had started, that included things like ‘find a pediatrician’ and ‘vaccinations’ and ‘daycare???’, and Clint wanted that list to be the foundation of a life he’d never got to have but desperately wanted to give Nate. 

“If you think it’s important,” James said doubtfully, “we can try and do something I guess.”

**

Two days later a tree turned up in the living room. Clint had no idea where it came from, though he suspected it had been cut from somewhere on the property, and James had rigged it up in a stand that looked to be nearly as old as Clint, the whole thing teetering and vaguely precarious. 

Clint kind of loved it. 

It was an absolute disaster, but then, he didn’t think holidays had to be perfect to be good. 

He very carefully didn’t ask about Hanukkah. James hadn’t seemed comfortable with the idea when Clint brought it up, but he’d also taken to trying his hand at frying potatoes and doughnuts with mixed success, so Clint figured he was _thinking_ about it if nothing else. With that in mind, Clint took a trip into town, the first he’d made since he’d brought James and Natasha and Nathan to the house at all, and headed for Wal-Mart. The tree needed decorating, but he thought he might find a few small things for James as well. A menorah, maybe, he’d been doing some late-night internet searches.

The selection was immensely disappointing. He didn’t find a single thing that was overtly Jewish, not even a simple menorah, and he was standing in the aisle of decorations wondering if he could finagle one out of candlesticks when he heard his name. 

“Clint Barton?”

The voice was familiar, though Clint couldn’t quite place it. At the other end of the aisle was a woman that looked as familiar as her voice sounded, but I took him a few minutes to recall who she was. “Miss Chartrand?” 

Margaret Chartrand had been Clint’s third grade teacher, just a couple of years before his dad had driven himself and Clint’s mother into a tree at high speed. She’d been one of the few adults Clint had encountered that hadn’t immediately written him off as the same kind of troublemaker as Barney, or a problem child of his father’s. She’d been genuinely kind to him when he was in her class, and he could remember a few times after that when she’d made it a point to stop him in the hallway and ask how his classes were or how he was doing. 

“It’s Olson, now,” she told him, clearly pleased that he remembered her. “I married Ray Olson, down at the county clerk’s office about, oh, fifteen years ago.” She smiled the smile of someone who felt secure in their life choices. “Now tell the truth, Clinton Francis, is it really a coincidence that the old Barton place has a new owner and, according to Anne down at the hardware store, is being fixed up into something habitable, and now I found you in Wal-mart buying Christmas decorations?”

Clint flushed, feeling the heat creep up in his cheeks, though he couldn’t have said why. “No ma’am,” he said, falling back on manners so old he barely remembered he had them. “A friend of mine was looking for a place-“ Clint paused while he tried to parse out exactly what kind of generic story he could tell that would allow James to live comfortably in this town without attracting too much attention. “He’s an Army vet, got a medical discharge, and he’s moved in with his son. I’m just trying to help him get settled in.”

There, that should be good enough. It was all mostly true, anyway, which made it easier to remember.

Mrs. Olson gave him a shrewd look. She glanced over into his cart, taking note of the silver stars and the blue twinkle lights Clint had managed to unearth. “Helping him decorate a tree?” She asked, something indecipherable in her tone. Then she laughed, like she’d thought of something suddenly. “I’m surprised it’s not all purple! That used to be the only color you liked.”

Clint shrugged, but managed a smile. “Yeah, well…” he hesitated then- “he’s Jewish,” Clint blurted, “but there’s nothing here for that.”

She sighed heavily. “I’m not surprised,” she said, and it sounded long-suffering. “You’d be better off making your own.” She gestured at the blue and silver pile in Clint’s cart. “Hanukkah isn’t Jewish Christmas, you know,” she said, falling back into the familiar cadence Clint remembered from learning times tables and adverbs, like she was getting ready to teach him something. “It’s a different tradition.” 

“I know, but I can’t find anything else,” he said, disgruntled all over again. “I thought maybe - the colors?”

Mrs. Olson gave him a considering look. “Well you get points for trying, I suppose. You might try second-hand shops or a drive into the Twin Cities, if it’s that important to you; there’s nowhere in town I know of where you can get what you’re looking for.” She patted him on the shoulder even though she had to stretch a bit to reach him. “Good luck,” she said, smiling a little at his obvious grumpiness. “Keep in touch!”

“I will,” Clint assured her, having no intention of doing any such thing. He was only here for a little while, after all, and it would be James’ place after that. But it had been nice to see her for a few minutes, and he appreciated that she was trying to help him out. He turned back to the candle holders, still wondering if he couldn’t epoxy them together into a kind of menorah for James, before giving up and heading towards the registers. 

Clint went home disappointed about the lack of Jewish things, but he managed to scrounge together enough blue things and star things and white things that at least the tree was the right colors, and he got a little ‘Baby’s first Christmas’ stocking for Nate that he hung over the fireplace on a nail that had been there for as long as he could remember. James had kind of smiled at it, running his thumbs over the edges of the fabric, before turning to Clint with raised eyebrows.

“What do we put in it?”

Clint gave James a scandalized look and covered Nate’s ears. “ _We_ don’t put anything in it, _Santa_ will fill it with whatever he deems fits if Nathan has been a good boy this year.”

James snorted and rolled his eyes, before staring at Clint expectantly. Clint shrugged. “My mom used to put fruit in ours, maybe some small toys, like little cars. I got no idea what you put in a baby stocking.”

The tree got decorated over the next couple of days, because it took Clint and Bucky a few tries to work out that the lights went on first, and then the ornaments, and _then_ the obnoxious silver tinsel Clint had got that was supposed to be artfully applied to the branches, but ended up looking a bit clumpy in places. 

Overall Clint was enjoying the hell out of himself, even with trying to keep Nate from eating tinsel, and James was getting better at frying donuts every day, letting Clint taste test all the new batches and jellies he was trying to get in them (with minimal success). It was a nice, quiet feeling, wrapped up in the house in the cold of the winter, with a fire in the fireplace and a misshapen tree lovingly decorated by a couple of idiots who had no idea what they were doing but doing it enthusiastically. It felt a little like replacing Clint’s childhood memories - fraught with tension and worry about how his dad would react - with something new and better. 

The only downside was the lack of overtly Jewish items.

Clint had gone out twice more since Wal-mart, looking for a menorah or anything else and hadn’t been able to find a thing anywhere, even in secondhand shops. James hadn’t said anything, but Clint caught him glancing at the tree and the stars, and looking almost wistful about it. He wished he’d been able to find something. 

The knock on the door a few days later surprised him, because it was getting late - or, rather, it was edging towards the early darkness this time of year was known for - and he hadn’t been expecting anybody even in the bright light of day. James was in the living room, positioned carefully between whomever was at the door and Nathan, while Clint edged his way over and peeked through the curtained half-window to see who was outside. 

To his surprise, the porch light showed him the newly-familiar form of Miss Char- Mrs. Olson, holding a metal baking sheet in her gloved hands, and a couple of flat, wrapped packages under her arm. Clint unlocked the door, carefully shooting a _stand down_ glance at James over his shoulder. Instead of relaxing, James leaned down to scoop Nathan up instead, all the better to beat a hasty retreat. His shoulders relaxed some though, and he stood in the living room willingly enough, his left hand folded carefully under the baby so that the metal wasn’t immediately noticeable. 

“Mrs. Olson,” Clint greeted, once he got the door unbolted and unchained, trying on a smile. 

“Clint,” she nodded up at him from underneath a chunky knit scarf she’d wrapped around her head. “I brought presents!” She held the pan out like a peace offering, and Clint took it from her automatically. When he got it closer to him, the warm scent of fried potatoes wafted up through the cold winter air. She brandished the two presents at him as well, small and wrapped in plain blue paper with silver ribbon. “And I thought I might meet this friend of yours, tell him all about how you terrorized the playground as a child.”

Clint snorted and, after getting a barely-there nod from James, took a step back to let her in the house. 

Mrs. Olson stomped the mud and snow off of her boots on the front mat as she unwound the scarf, handing it to Clint absentmindedly but keeping hold of the shiny blue gifts. “Hello,” she greeted, turning a warm smile that Clint remembered well from his childhood onto James and Nathan. “I’m Maggie Olson, it’s nice to meet you.”

James gave her a slightly suspicious look, but he hefted Nathan up a little higher on his arm and held out his right hand to shake hers. “James Barnes,” he told her, with more manners than Clint would have credited him with.

Then again, he’d had plenty of manners on the ship, when he’d wanted to, and it would behoove him to make nice with the neighbors in such a small town. 

“And who’s this adorable little one?” Mrs. Olson asked, but wisely didn’t reach for the baby. 

“Nathan,” James told her, after a slight hesitation. He gave Clint a quick, slightly-panicked glance that meant he’d got about as far into this interaction as he could manage on his own. 

“What brings you all the way out here Miss Char- sorry, Mrs. Olson?” he asked, attracting her attention. 

“Oh, call me Maggie, everybody does,” she said, running her fingers through her short hair and trying to tame it into some sense of order. “Like I said, I brought presents. It’s the first night of Hanukkah. It's a good night for gifts from old friends.” 

James looked startled, and this time Maggie Olson didn’t miss it. “Oh don’t tell me Clint didn’t mention he’d run into me at the store? Just like a man.” She tutted. “I saw Clint at Wal-Mart and he mentioned he couldn’t find you anything to celebrate the holiday with, so I thought I could help out.” She handed the packages both to James, who took them awkwardly. “The heavier one is for you, and the small one is for your little guy there. And latkes for everyone, obviously,” she said, gesturing at the pan Clint was still holding. 

Sitting down on the sofa with Nathan in his lap, James glanced between Clint and Maggie Olson for a long moment, before his gaze flicked to the cheerful little present in his lap. He slipped a finger under the edge of the tape, clutching the box between his knees until he could get the tape ripped off. Inside was a plain white box, which he sat on the coffee table in order to get the lid off, and inside of _that_ was something wrapped in plain white tissue paper.

When James pulled it out it was a wooden menorah, obviously well-loved and well used, and possibly hand-carved.

“It was my brother’s,” Mrs. Olson said, looking a little wistful. “It’d be nice to see it lit in a window again.” She didn’t elaborate further. 

“Thank you,” James managed, though he seemed more baffled than anything he clearly understood the gesture meant something to her. 

Nathan was slapping at his own box, and he’d managed to get the edge of the curled silver ribbon in his mouth and was gnawing on it enthusiastically. James reached up and gently fished it out, pulling the ribbon off of the box and setting it aside with his own trash. He hooked a finger in the edge of the paper and let Nathan grab hold of it, pulling eagerly. The loud ripping sound of the paper seemed to delight the baby, because he tore into it as happily as any kid Clint had ever seen open a present, until he revealed a second plain white box that James had to help him get into. 

Inside was what Clint first took to be a felt flag - it was blue and had a sewn-on menorah of its own, gold against the navy backdrop. But wrapped up with it were nine little felt flames in shades of yellow and orange. 

“They stick with velcro,” Mrs. Olson said, matter-of-fact. “I make them for my nieces and nephews when they’re little, so they can have their own menorah to light until they’re big enough to light a real candle.” She bent her head to dig around in her purse and Clint edged closer to James, silently passing him a black glove he’d grabbed from the table near the front door. James pulled it on quickly before sitting Nathan down on the floor in front of the flag menorah, which he immediately put straight into his mouth. Mrs. Olson made a noise of triumph and pulled out a large ziplock bag filled with white tapered candles. She held it out to James, who took it reluctantly. Her face softened as he looked between the bag and the menorah, obvious consternation in his expression. 

“Here,” she said, reaching for the menorah, which James obligingly passed to her. She glanced around the room and then headed confidently for the dining table, setting the menorah down in the center, where Clint could just barely see their reflections in the dark glass of the kitchen window. 

Clint rummaged around in the junk drawer and handed over a box of matches before she could ask, while James scooped Nathan up and followed them to the table, caution and something softer at war on his face. 

“You light this one first,” she said, very patiently, as she placed a candle in the center of the menorah, where it would sit higher than the others. “The shamash. And then use it to light the others. The first one goes here.” She put a second candle on the farthest right. “Every night you light the shamash and use it to light the others, the newest candle first, while you say the blessings.”

She struck the match against the block, the familiar _snap-hiss_ and the scent of sulfur sending Clint’s mind skittering in a thousand directions. She lit the shamash, and then used it to light the single other candle on the menorah, humming something unfamiliar as she did so. When she spoke, it was in an unfamiliar language - Hebrew, Clint assumed - and while James didn’t join in, he listened attentively, his mouth moving silently just a half-second behind her, like he was memorizing the words.

Or remembering them. 

They stood in silence when she was done, staring at the flames for a long moment, until Nathan began squirming to be let down, making aborted little shrieks and babbles and smacking James on the shoulder. 

Mrs. Olson snorted a laugh and James sat Nate down on the floor at his feet, where he promptly rocked up onto all fours and made a beeline for the packaging still on the coffee table. Clint swooped in and scooped it all up, getting it out of his reach just in time. Nathan contented himself with the flag and felt flames, clenching the blue of the menorah felt in his fist and stuffing one of the orange candle flames in his mouth before spitting it out and looking betrayed. 

“I have something better to eat,” Mrs. Olson assured him, reaching for the baking sheet Clint had sat down on the countertop. She unwrapped the foil to reveal latkes that were, miraculously, still warm. “I assume with a baby in the house you have applesauce?”

James and Clint exchanged glances and James went to dig in the fridge. After a moment he produced a jar of the stuff, along with a plastic container of sour cream that he hesitantly handed her.

“If you must,” she sniffed, but there was a smile lurking around the edges of her face. 

She stayed only long enough to eat two of the potato pancakes - pointedly swirled in applesauce - and remind them to let the candles burn completely out on their own. “Should only take about an hour,” she assured them, catching the nervous look they cast at the baby. Then she swept out of the house in the same bustle of activity she’d arrived in, forcing Clint to stoop down so that she could give him a quick but firm hug and running her fingers through the mop of dark curls on Nathan’s head. 

“It was nice to meet you, James,” she said, but wisely refrained from trying to give him the same treatment. 

“Nice to meet you too,” he managed, and she gave him a brilliant smile before ducking out of the front door into the wind and snow. 

“Welp,” Clint said, once her headlights had disappeared down the road. “That happened.”

“Yeah,” James agreed, still sounding a little shell-shocked. 

In the kitchen, the candles burned merrily, casting cheerful light across the scarred dining table. 

**

“Merry Christmas,” Clint beamed, the edge of the cheap Santa hat he’d picked up for this exact moment falling into his peripheral vision. He brushed it back, but it unbalanced the hat and it threatened to slip off of his head, so he let it fall back into place. He didn’t figure the hat would last that long with Nathan around anyway. 

James gave him a surly look. “It’s 6am. What’s there to be merry about?” Nathan was in his high chair, banging bits of banana and whatever cereal James had given him to practice putting in his mouth, chattering happily to himself while James nursed a steaming cup of coffee. 

“Presents!” Clint said winningly, gesturing at the somewhat-pitiful pile under the somewhat-pitiful tree in the corner.

Next year they’d do better.

But at least a handful of the things under there were for James, and 90% of them were for Nathan to rip open - something he’d been trying to do for days anyway - and if Clint wanted to be excited about it, he damn well could be. He sauntered over to the counter, pouring his own coffee and turning to lean against it, where he could survey James and Nathan and the Christmas tree all at once.

“So when can we-”

“After breakfast,” James cut him off. “Fucks’ sake, we can at least eat something.”

Clint pouted, mostly for show, moving out of the way with aplomb when James got up to shoulder-check him out of the kitchen. To his credit, he went simple, scrambling up eggs and putting toast in the toaster, nothing complicated that would delay Clint’s present-giving too much. 

He’d fumbled his way through the remaining nights of Hanukkah, reciting the blessings Mrs. Olson had taught him in a hesitant, uncertain way, almost under his breath, but his hands had been steady when he’d lit the candles and he’d helped Nathan stick his own candle flames to his little felt menorah every night before bed. Clint had mostly tried to stay out of the way, though his one attempt to retreat to his room had been stopped by a plaintive look from James, so he’d hung around awkwardly. 

Not that he hadn’t wanted to be there, he just hadn’t wanted to _intrude_. James seemed to want him around though, handing Nathan off so he could strike the matches, and glancing at Clint uncertainly every so often as he spoke an unfamiliar language. 

In return, Clint was trying to keep Christmas light, not take up too much space with it, but at the same time he was excited to be doing something fun, something he could reclaim from his own past, even if he never quite described it that way to James. Clint’s Christmases has been fraught with tension when he was a kid, and he hadn’t had anything like a celebration in years, not since he and Barney had run away and joined the circus. Mostly Clint was happy to be making happier memories for Nathan than he had ever had, and he was determined to start out right. 

Which meant, of course, that he’d gone overboard on gift-buying, but that was alright. Nathan didn’t _need_ a thing, but Clint didn’t believe kids should only get things they needed, they should also get thinks they wanted or would like, so he’d pulled a half a dozen noise-making nightmare toys off the shelves at the store, along with another half-dozen educational things that had struck his fancy, and a load of cutesy baby clothes Clint hadn’t been able to pass up. Most of it was far too big, and half of it was band shirts of Clint’s favorites, but he hadn’t been able to resist teeny onesies with AC-DC and Johnny Cash written across them. 

The best part of the morning turned out not to be watching Nathan rip into brightly colored paper with glee (though that was fun by itself, and Clint made it a point to get a few photos using an old polaroid camera he’d dug up and managed to get film for), but watching James’ bewilderment slowly morph into a warm, quiet delight when Clint dumped a handful of gifts into his lap. 

James had been, unsurprisingly, much more difficult to shop for. Clint had found him a nice pair of thin leather gloves with chevron stitching that he could wear around all winter to keep his hand covered if he wanted, along with a warmer hat for outside and a heavy flannel that was lined in sherpa, because whilst Clint hadn’t got a single practical thing for the kid, he’d made sure just about everything he’d got for James would have good use.

Except for a t-shirt Clint hadn’t been able to walk by - but this one wasn’t for a band. He’d even tagged it “from Nathan” because that was exactly the kind of dork Clint apparently was. The shirt said “Dad. The Man. The Myth. The Legend.” and the irony of it had been irresistible. James gave him a sardonic look over that, but he’d added it to the small pile of gifts next to him on the couch. 

“Merry Christmas,” Clint said, feeling rather pleased with himself. 

“I didn’t get you anything,” James admitted, looking slightly sheepish about it, but Clint shrugged. 

He couldn’t keep the contented smile off of his face, and it wasn’t like he needed or wanted anything he didn’t already have. “I got everything I need anyway,” Clint told him, gesturing at the house, warmed by a fire and more welcoming than he could ever remember it being before. “This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had,” he added, when his words didn’t wipe the look of consternation off of James’ face. 

James’ look turned considering then, his head cocked to one side like he was thinking deeper thoughts. 

“Merry Christmas,” James finally told him. He levered himself off the couch before Clint could respond, dropping gracefully onto the floor by Nate and opening the plastic drum set Clint had got him, pulling out the other musical toys that went with it. “Though I’m not sure I should say thank you, considering how much of a headache he’s gonna give us with all this crap.”

Clint shrugged again, unable to feel even remotely sorry. He was sure he’d regret the noise-making toys eventually, but watching Nate happily banging away at the plastic and gnawing on the tambourine more than made up for it. “You’re welcome anyway,” Clint assured him. 

What was a little headache compared to the delight which Nate was getting out of all of it? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks to Nny for the bestest beta read <3 
> 
> And extra special lots of thanks to Not-The-Blue for being the best Jewish sensitivity reader, and also to Steph for her invaluable input and encouragement when I decided that I wanted to incorporate Jewish Bucky and allow him to reclaim that heritage. You are both the best, thank you for putting up with my neurotic behavior.


	4. Chapter 4

“James,” Clint said, carefully modulating his voice to betray no emotion. It was a technique he’d perfected in the field, any number of comm calls with Coulson testifying to the fact that Clint could sound reasonably calm even with a bullet wound. 

Of course, that meant that James came skidding around the corner like something was on _fire_ because apparently he knew Clint better than Clint thought, and therefore Clint’s ability to convince James that everything was _fine_ using only his voice was shit. 

“Is he supposed to be doing that?” Clint hissed, after a moment. 

“Uh.” James seemed at a loss for words, standing in the passthrough from the kitchen to the living room. 

Nathan was standing at the edge of the table, precariously balanced on his own two feet, and grinning broadly at Clint. Clint smiled tentatively back, trying to look encouraging, and then Nate took an unsteady step forward on shaky, chubby legs. And then another. And then a third, before he clapped, laughing and clearly delighted with himself. 

“Is he _walking_ now?” Clint asked, mildly horrified. Crawling was bad enough in terms of things he could get into and ways he could get himself into trouble, but walking was clearly worse and walking led to things like _running_ and _climbing_ and the kids was only nine months old, was this even something nine month old babies did?!

“Looks like it,” James grumbled, sounding as put-out with the situation as Clint felt.

They’d passed New Year’s mostly in the sweet relief of sleep because Nathan had finally, for the first time since Clint had come back to the farm, slept through the night. Clint suspected his relief was shared by new parents the world over, then immediately banished the ‘new parent’ idea from his mind because he wasn’t a _parent_ dammit, he was just helping James out. Glorified babysitting at best, that was what Clint was doing. No parenting here, nosiree, not a bit. 

“Should he be walking?”

“Well,” James hedged, “it’s early but not _impossible_.”

Clint sighed. “We gotta babyproof more shit don’t we?”

“We gotta babyproof more shit,” James agreed. 

Nathan took two more steps before he lost his balance and fell, butt-first, onto the hardwoods in the living room, still chortling with delight. 

***

Babyproofing didn’t last that long. 

Or rather, Clint and James made a valiant effort at it, but Nathan demolished their efforts nearly as fast as they could manage them. He plucked socket covers out of plugs, hauled himself onto the furniture, and progressed from barely walking to toddling to full on running in the space of a week, Clint and James chasing along behind him. He mastered climbing out of his crib with astonishing speed. 

The kicker was when he got mad about being unable to get into the kitchen because of a newly-installed baby gate, and proceeded to shriek and shake it until he ripped the thing down and plowed his way into the dining room before Clint could scoop him up to keep him from getting under James’ feet. 

Clint replaced the gate and ratcheted the tension higher, checking to make sure the gate was firmly in place. 

Nathan tore it back down less than half an hour later. 

“Um,” Clint said, as the gate came down for the third time, this time with the wooden tension handle broken off. 

James sighed. 

“You know how in that file-” Clint started, thinking about scientific notes documenting Nathan’s progress, and the speculation about the serum James had been given. 

“Yeah,” James bit off, “I got it.”

“Congratulations, it’s a super-baby?” Clint ventured, aiming for humor. 

James scrubbed his hands over his face in frustration. Clint could sympathize. It was bad enough to be hiding a cloned baby from a terrorist organization, it was a different thing altogether to be hiding a baby that was _enhanced_ or whatever, because that was bound to attract the wrong sort of attention no matter how you sliced it. 

“Well, this is a problem,” James said after a few seconds of silence. 

“I mean…” Clint held his hand out and wobbled it side to side. Like it _could_ be a problem but it didn’t _have_ to be. “It’s not like he’s in school. Or daycare. Or whatever. You can just keep him home until he’s big enough to get a handle on it. Kids are smart, they can keep things to themselves.”

God knew Clint had kept a load of things to himself as a kid, and in retrospect he wondered - late at night or when he’d had way too much to drink - how much different his life would have been if he hadn’t been so careful to hide his bruises and his fear and his sadness. 

Nathan wouldn’t be hiding anything like that, but he could be taught how to keep certain things under wraps. 

“Yeah,” James said, frowning like he wasn’t happy about it. “I guess.”

“I know it’s not ideal, but it could be worse.”

Clint wasn’t surprised, later, to find James up in the middle of the night. Nathan was sleeping through the night consistently now, but both of them were still up from time to time, used to getting up with a fussy baby or - in Clint’s case tonight - up with the nightmares and what-ifs that he ignored during his waking hours and therefore haunted him in his sleep. 

James was sitting at the dining table with a cup of something hot in his hand, staring into the liquid like it held the secrets of the universe. Clint padded into the room barefoot, careful to lean his weight on the creaky step so that James would know he was coming. James didn’t glance up, but Clint saw his eyes flick over and his shoulders hunch up even further. 

“Can’t sleep?” Clint asked, making his way to the fridge and leaning inside as though there would be anything new in there that hadn’t been there when he’d gone to bed. Eventually he settled on a glass of orange juice, though it wasn’t the whiskey that he secretly wanted but avoided because he’d seen his dad too deep in a bottle to ever think that drinking his nightmares away was a good idea. 

James grunted. 

Clint flopped into the chair across from him with his juice, pondering the look in James’ face and wondering what could have put it there. He had no doubt that James had his own nightmares - had to have, based on what was in that file - but he didn’t have the look of a man who’d woken from a bad dream. Instead he had the look of one who hadn’t slept at all, too caught up in his own thoughts to relax. 

“This is why I took him,” James said, when Clint’s glass was nearly empty and he could feel the heat of the last embers of the fire and the comfortable silence of the house starting to relax him. 

Unsure of what to say, Clint made a noise of acknowledgement and motioned for James to go on. 

“All that fucked up shit they did to me? They’d have done that to him. Maybe worse, I don’t know.” He sounded bleak, worn out and unhappy. “I couldn’t let that happen. I allowed- I _did_ a lot of bad shit.” The look he gave Clint was full of shame, and Clint barely resisted stretching his hand out to cover James’, because he didn’t think it would be welcome. “But I couldn’t let that happen to him.” His voice cracked a little at the end, and it was strange to Clint that the most fearsome assassin of the 20th century had turned it all around for a chubby smile, had risked everything for a tiny person he didn’t owe a single thing to. 

Then again, glancing around at the dramatic changes they’d made to his childhood home, maybe it wasn’t that strange at all. 

“Well,” Clint started, when it was obvious James wasn’t going to say anything else. “You did the right thing, and now you gotta own it.” James blinked at him in surprise. “That kid’s your son - I signed the paperwork myself.” The meager attempt at humor won him a snort. “He’s your kid, and you can’t fix all the fucked up shit that happened to you. I mean, maybe you could get some therapy or something, but you can’t undo it. But you can make sure that fucked up shit doesn’t happen to him - and you did. You got him out, and now he’s safe and _you_ did that. Whatever else you might have done - and I disagree that you’re the problem here by the way - whatever else might have happened, you did this one good thing. Maybe it doesn’t make up for all the bad things, but it’s a good thing, and you get to keep making it a good thing. Nathan gets to have toys and Hanukkah and Christmas and whatever else you want to give him because you - you and Nat - did that for him. You’re giving him the life he wouldn’t have had otherwise, and you can’t ask more than that from yourself.”

“You helped,” James said, after a moment, looking both surprised and touched. 

Clint shrugged awkwardly. “Yeah a little bit. I didn’t steal the experimental baby from the terrorists and smuggle him to a new life.”

“You kinda did, idiot.” 

“Sure,” Clint said, flippantly, “Barton’s Halfway House for Ex-Brainwashed Assassins, at your service.”

James did what Clint hadn’t been sure he could, and he reached out and rested his right hand over Clint’s, lightly, like he didn’t want to restrain him. “Don’t do that.” He said firmly. “You gave us somewhere to go, somewhere safe to be.”

Clint flinched a little under the touch, but managed to leave his hand in place. “Well it’s your place now. A safe house. Permanently - it’s yours. It’s not a halfway house, or a stop on the road. It’s your home. For as long as you want.”

“It’s yours too,” James said, and then he released Clint’s hand, standing up to go to the sink and rinse his mug out. 

He left Clint sitting at the dining table with as much on his mind as James had probably had when he’d come downstairs in the first place. Clint sat in the muted light, staring at the empty glass in his hand for a long time, wondering what he was meant to do with that.

**

When Clint came downstairs the next morning - much later than usual, he’d tossed and turned a bit before falling asleep and it was gone 10am now - it was to a surprising sight. Nate was playing happily in a playpen James had acquired from someplace, something he hadn’t yet managed to escape from, but James was sitting at the kitchen table in a sleeveless tank, his metal arm in front of him as he prodded at it with a tiny screwdriver. His left shoulder was a silver cap, like the ball of a ball-in-socket joint, smooth-looking with small, flat sensors that likely connected to the arm when it was attached. Clint stopped to stare for far too long, his uncaffeinated and sleep-deprived brain unable to process. 

“Can you give me a hand?” James said, after a long moment, and Clint blinked. 

“Did you just- is that a joke?” Clint asked.

James didn’t respond but the edges of his mouth quirked just a little. 

“It’s too early,” Clint decided. “I need coffee.” James snorted as Clint made his way to the coffee pot, filling his cup to the brim. After he drained it, he refilled the cup then took the seat across the table from James, watching as he fiddled with a plate on the backside of the arm. “Do you really need help?”

“I need a vice,” James grunted as the arm rocked under his hand, “but if you can hold it still, that’ll help.”

Clint reached out and wrapped both hands around the arm’s forearm, holding it steady.

“Thanks.”

They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, Clint occasionally able to let go of the arm with one hand to sip at his coffee, before curiosity got the better of him. “So what are you doing?”

James grunted. “Maintenance and repair. It needs regular upkeep, but there’s a plate in the back that’s grinding.”

Clint made a contemplative little noise. If the arm always needed regular work, it surprised Clint he’d never seen James do it before, unless it had taken until now for him to need help. But he figured James could’ve rigged something up to hold the arm in place if he’d wanted to, and setting up situations for Clint to find things out rather than just talking about them like a normal person seemed like a pattern with James. The Winter Soldier file, for one, but there had been other things, other times where James had made himself available for information rather than just volunteering it. 

“I didn’t know you knew how to work on stuff like this.”

James gave him a look. “They made sure I knew how to patch myself up,” he said. “That includes the arm.”

“Maybe you should get some kinda degree,” Clint mused. “Gotta be a useful skill, being able to work on electronics or whatever. Engineering?”

All he got was a grunt in response, and Clint let it simmer for a while as he thought about what this might be leading to. He wasn’t sure if James wanted him to know something specific or if this was just some kind of display of trust. “It’s kinda weird that you remember this stuff,” Clint said after a while, “and how to like… kill a man with a plastic spork in like seven different ways-”

“Nine,” James interrupted, without looking up. 

“Okay, nine different ways.” Clint rolled his eyes. “But they could erase the other stuff. Like they didn’t teach you to shoot a gun every time, right?”

“No. I always knew that.” James heaved a sigh, and slipped the three metal plates he’d removed from the arm back into place. He pulled the arm back towards him and Clint let go, wrapping his hands around the now-empty coffee mug. James lifted his arm up and popped it into place, where it made a mechanical latching sound and then the plates all shifted as they recalibrated. He rotated the arm in a wide circle, like he was settling it into place, the muscles in his chest flexing with the rotational movement and making Clint wonder how much the arm weighed. It was a smooth economy of motion, every bit as natural-looking as James’ other arm, other than the mechanical sound, and the rippling of the plates and flex of the arm made Clint’s chest tighten up in something like the cousin of anxiety. Weird and squirmy, not quite a threat, but not something he could really put a name to either. When James was done checking his range of motion, he threaded his fingers together and rested his hands on the table, surprising Clint by not getting up and immediately moving to avoid the conversation. “It’s something to do with how the brain stores things. Muscle memory, rote tasks - those I never had to re-learn. Like learning to walk; once you can do it, you don’t have to think about it. But people? Places? Those were always gone.” He made a little face, like maybe there was something he wanted to add but couldn’t think how to say it, or wasn’t sure he should. “Sometimes stuff comes back. I think the serum- it heals my body faster and better than normal people, maybe it heals my brain too? I’m not… not sure.”

“Do you… remember anything from before?” Clint asked hesitantly. 

If James didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t, but Clint didn’t want to push his luck too far. 

“You mean do I remember Steve Rogers,” James said flatly. 

Clint shrugged. He hadn’t specifically meant Rogers, but he couldn’t deny he was curious. 

“I dream things, sometimes,” James said, his gaze far away. “Events that don’t have context, that are missing the… feelings that go with them. I remember it was raining the day his mother died. I remember schoolyard fights, the kind that bleed into one another so that I don’t know if it was one fight or a dozen.” James took a deep breath. “I remember ‘to the end of the line’ and cold nights on the European front, and I dream about falling off that goddamn train, but if you’re asking if I remember my old life the answer’s no. I don’t remember a damn thing about being Bucky Barnes, and even less about what it felt like to be pals with Steve Rogers, much less Captain America.”

“Hey,” Clint said softly, aiming for soothing, though God knew he’d never been any good at it. “Hey.” He reached out, resting his hand over James’ clenched fingers. “You don’t gotta-”

“I know how to dismantle and reassemble thirty-seven different firearms, and how to kill a man in an improbable number of ways, and I’m pretty sure I could create an explosive out of the shit in the barn, but I don’t remember how to be a person.”

“Well,” Clint said, cutting off the diatribe before it could really get going, seeing how James was winding himself up, “I can make a bomb out of what’s under the kitchen sink, so I don’t think that disqualifies you from personhood.”

James snorted, though it was wet-sounding, and Clint squeezed his hands again. He wasn’t looking up, wasn’t meeting Clint’s eyes, and Clint didn’t know if that was him hiding or him getting himself back under control or both, but he let it happen. 

“You’re doin’ just fine as a person,” Clint reassured him. “You got coffee preferences and everything.”

“I think your standards are low,” James told him hoarsely.

Clint shrugged. “You got someone else whose standards you care about?”

James looked up then, his expression unreadable. “No,” he finally admitted. “No one else.” Then he got up and went to the sink, taking Clint’s mug with him to wash it out and turn his back to the room at large. Clint left him to it, figuring therapy hour must be over, and headed into the living to pluck Nate out of the playpen so that he could get his much-needed morning cuddle. 

Nate wasn’t having much of it, squirming to be let down just as soon as Clint got him up, but Clint managed to avail himself of a whiff of baby-scent and a burble against the kid’s neck before he set him on the floor where he could run amok for a bit. 

“He’s climbing the stairs now,” James warned, a half second after Nate made it to the bottom step and started upwards. 

Clint groaned.

**

James’ birthday snuck up on them nearly unnoticed, its creeping approach similar to the spring it preceded - you didn’t notice it was almost there until there were early blooms pushing their way up through the wet soil. It wasn’t quite spring weather - Iowa didn’t see warm temperatures until a fair bit later in the season - but the day dawned cold and bright and breezy, sunshine bearing down on them from a clear blue sky. It was much less warm than the sunshine felt, blazing through the windows and creating cozy pools of light wherever it landed, but it felt sort of serendipitous to Clint.

The first birthday in a new life for James. 

He didn’t _say_ that, of course, but the thought lingered. 

Nathan was now walking _and_ talking, still a bit early but not as alarmingly as Clint would have predicted two months previous. He could say Dadda with astonishing clarity, and used it interchangeably for both Clint and James, though James was doing his best to replace it with ‘Papa’ and Clint was telling Nate his name over and over to no avail, and he could also manage ‘milk’ and ‘shoe’ and ‘eat’. By far his favorite and most-used words were ‘uh-oh’ which he announced with unholy glee anytime he knocked something over, down, or off any flat surface, often intentionally; and ‘no’ which he said even when he meant ‘yes’. James would tell him to eat his food, or pick up a toy, or come put his shoes on, and Nate would shout ‘no, no, no, no’ even as he ran to do it. 

Of course, he also used ‘no’ when he meant it as well, flatly refusing to have his diaper changed and leading whichever one of them was trying to do it on a merry chase, giggling the entire time. 

Clint got up with Nate this morning, grabbing him out of his crib just as he started babbling and before he started shrieking “Daddaaaaaa” at the top of his lungs - which was his morning routine - and headed downstairs to keep him occupied until James woke up, which was frankly the best birthday gift Clint had thought of thus far. If buying for James at Christmas had been difficult, getting anything for the man for his birthday was downright impossible. His first ideas had been weaponry or weaponry adjacent, but he’d seen how James had been trying to leave the gun in the safe he’d bought - though on many days he didn’t succeed - and how much he didn’t want a life of violence for Nate. 

Which had left him with exactly zero gift ideas, other than more silly t-shirts. 

He did, however, have a plan. It was a bit of a stupid plan, but then Coulson often said most of his ideas were and yet they usually worked out alright in the end. Clint was willing to risk it. He wasn’t likely to end up with a bullet hole for his trouble, which was better than his usual odds. 

James stumbled down the stairs barely a half hour after Clint had got up with Nathan, which wasn’t as much sleeping in as _Clint_ would have done, but he figured it was better than nothing. He looked grumpy and disheveled, something Clint seldom saw. He was typically up after James had already had his first cup of coffee and seen the business end of a hairbrush, and if he didn’t think it might actually get him shot Clint would have called it cute.

“Morning birthday boy,” he said, instead of poking fun at the tangled mess of brown hair and scowling face. “I made breakfast.”

“You made _toast_ ,” James grumbled, but he poured himself a cup of coffee and took two slices off the stack.

“Well, would you have rather I attempted actual cooking?” Clint said pragmatically, and James grimaced in response, which Clint took for agreement. “I got a few errands to run,” Clint continued, without waiting for James’ biting commentary on his lack of cooking skills. “I should be back for dinner, and you don’t need to cook.”

James shot him a skeptical look. Clint rolled his eyes. “I’m not gonna cook, don’t worry, but I’ll bring dinner back with me. For your birthday, we’re celebrating.”

It made James roll his eyes, but he also ducked his head to stare into the mug of coffee in his hands, and Clint was reasonably sure that it was pleased embarrassment rather than irritation. Whoever James had been before Hydra and then the Red Room got their hands on him, he was now a quiet sort of man, inclined to small smiles and a dry sense of humor, private and easily embarrassed by overt displays of affection. Even Nathan’s attention set him off sometimes, his quiet delight offset by his uneasiness with the little boy’s obvious adoration. 

So Clint didn’t have a big, special surprise planned or anything like that, nothing that would make James uncomfortable - he hoped - but he also couldn’t let the day pass without some kind of marker that it had happened. It’d been more than fifty years since James had celebrated a birthday, and Clint was determined that he would have this one. 

**

Clint rolled back up a few hours later, laden down with a large pizza box, a six pack of the fanciest beer Waverly had to offer - which wasn’t all that fancy - and a package that he hoped would please the recipient. James came out the front door, Nate on one arm, and took the beer from where it was teetering precariously on top of the stack, glancing dubiously over the entire thing. 

“What’s all this?”

“Birthday celebration,” Clint grunted, shifting his hold on the pizza box. 

James snorted but followed Clint inside willingly enough, putting the beer on the dining table next to the box of pizza, and glancing curiously at the large cardboard box that was taped haphazardly with packing tape and completely unlabeled. 

Turning on his heel, Clint headed back out for the final thing he’d bought, lifting the bakery box from where he’d carefully placed it in the footwell and checking it hadn’t got jostled too much on the ride. One of the numbered candles he’d placed on the top was listing slightly to the left underneath the clear plastic of the box, but it was otherwise unharmed, and Clint grinned.

Inside James was strapping Nathan into a high chair and pulling out one of the jars of baby food he typically avoided, preferring to give Nathan food the same or similar to what he and Clint were eating, but Clint guessed pizza and babies didn’t mix as well as chicken or green beans. When he had Nathan all sorted James turned around, looking cautiously expectant, if somewhat dubious. “So what’s all this?” He asked, gesturing at the pizza and the beer and the cake box from the supermarket. He even managed to get the cardboard box that Clint had left sitting on the coffee table. 

“I promised dinner and I delivered, and what’s birthday without a cake? I even brought a present.”

James lifted the lid of the pizza box with one finger, taking in the contents, the greasy cheese and the steaming heat, and the wide variety of vegetables on top because Clint had noticed James liked to try new things and he figured the roasted garlic and the bright red peppers would go over better than plain old pepperoni. The way James’ mouth curled into a tiny smile told Clint he was right, even as James snorted at the sight of the candles on the cake.

“I think your math is a little off,” he said, something wistful in his voice.

“Nope,” Clint said, “Hydra years don’t count. I’ve allowed you one per decade of brainwashing, and only because you’re determined to be the oldest person in the house, so you’ll be 32 and like it.”

That bought him a tiny huff of laughter, low and faint and far less strangled with melancholy than James’ comments about math had been. It ignited something small and warm in Clint’s gut, some mixture of pride and happiness that made him feel like he’d done something right. He went and got the box from the table and brought it over, letting James snap the tape open with his fingers and dig around inside. 

Maybe they were doing it wrong - Clint didn’t know, he could barely remember any birthdays he’d had as a kid, but he thought there’d been food and then singing and then cake and _then_ presents - but James still had that tiny smile on his face and Clint would do just about anything to keep it there.

James lifted the contents of the box out, the grin on his face now more amused than anything, and raised an eyebrow at Clint. Clint gestured at the box, and James set the brand new VCR aside, reaching back inside to pull out the carefully selected tapes that went with it.

“For your birthday,” Clint said dramatically, grinning hard enough that his face was going to start hurting soon, “I got you all of your favorite things. Pizza, beer, cake, and B-grade action flicks.”

“Clint,” James said patiently, “those are _your_ favorite things.”

He was already flipping through the movie cases, reading the back covers with his eyebrows climbing steadily higher. Clint had got a wide range of options, from _The Mummy_ to _Terminator_ to _Titanic_ to _Jurassic Park_. He’d even grabbed _Splash_ from the discount bin and _Independence Day_ because not only was it cool as fuck, but it had a real nice Jewish scene in it that Clint thought James would maybe like. 

“Yeah,” Clinta agreed after a second, because they _were_ his favorite things, “but I haven’t figured out your favorites yet, so I thought this year I’d share my favorites with you.”

James looked up sharply, a movie case in each hand and his brow furrowed. He was studying Clint intensely, some storm of emotions wrapped up in the grip he had on the movies and the way his eyes flicked over Clint’s expression and the way his lips were pressed together into a thin, white line. Clint almost apologized - maybe he’d overstepped, or assumed too much - but then James swallowed hard, his entire expression, hell, his entire _body_ , softening into something Clint couldn’t decipher at all. He only knew that it made the warm, squirming sensation from earlier come back in full force.

“Thank you,” James said solemnly, like Clint had given him something a lot more precious than movies with absurd plot lines and pizza from the niche place on the pricey side of town. 

Clint shrugged, awkward for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate, but luckily James just let it go, instead pulling plates down out of the cabinet like Clint needed a _plate_ to eat pizza, as though directly from the box wasn’t sufficient, and even going so far as to get a serving knife from the drawer for the cake. 

The pizza was delicious, even though Clint was probably a classic pepperoni or meat lovers’ fan through and through, and the beer was crisp and cold and better than he was expecting. He was mentally congratulating himself as James put what was left away in the fridge and then reached for the knife like he was going to cut the cake without lighting the candles. 

“No dice,” Clint said, taking the serving knife out of his hand, “you gotta blow out the candles and make a wish, it’s tradition.” 

James rolled his eyes, but he let go of the knife without any complaint and waited without comment for Clint to dig the matches out of the junk drawer and light the candles. He was leaning over to blow them out when Clint stopped him again. 

“We’re singing,” Clint informed him, pausing to scoop Nate out of the chair. “Happy birthday, to you,” he sang, aiming for the breathy rendition that Marilyn Monroe had made famous singing for JFK. “Happy birthday to youuuu, happy birthday Mr. Barnes, happy birthday toooo youuuuu.” 

Nathan clapped happily, squirming in Clint’s arms. “Eat!” He announced. 

James stared at him like he was absolutely out of his mind.

“Never mind,” Clint sighed. “Just blow your candles out, old man.”

He did, leaning forward and blowing a low, gentle stream of air between pursed lips and putting the two candles on top of the cake out immediately, before the wax even had time to melt very much. Clint reached out and plucked the 2 out of the cake and licked the icing off the end. 

Wordlessly, James passed him the other candle. Clint thought about arguing, but instead he held it up to Nathan and let him suck on the end of it, the baby’s eyes widening at the sweetness of the icing. 

James made an outraged noise.

“What? He’s gonna get his own cake next month.”

To Clint’s surprise, James let it go, slicing the cake instead and giving Clint a piece along with a hard look that was probably supposed to mean he wasn’t meant to feed any of it to Nathan, which Clint promptly ignored by forking the second bite directly into Nate’s open mouth. James made to take the cake from him and Clint hugged it close to his body possessively. “I won’t give him any more,” he said defensively, “but he deserved a bite! We’re celebrating!”

“We won’t be celebratin’ shit if he won’t go to sleep,” James warned, but Nathan was already slumping onto Clint’s shoulder, soft and warm and sleepy, and Clint didn’t think it was going to be a problem. 

When they were done, Clint hustled Nate upstairs, changing his diaper and swapping his clothes out for footie pajamas, before singing him gently to sleep to the tune of ‘Wonderwall’ as he laid him in his crib. The baby rolled over, his blanket clenched in his little fist as he curled up onto his knees, butt in the air and thumb in his mouth, and something in Clint’s chest turned over with him. 

When he got back downstairs James had popped a large bag of popcorn and was in the process of hooking the VCR up to the television. More power to him, in Clint’s opinion, because working electronics was not his forte. Instead he settled on the couch with the popcorn bowl in his lap, already munching on the hot, buttery kernels. 

“What are we watching?” He asked, licking butter off of his thumb. 

James made a face at him, but he held up the case of the movie he’d selected. It was the single new release that Clint had picked up - _The Mummy_ \- and he felt his face fold into a grin. “Cool, I’ve been wanting to see that one. Classic boy meets girl, girl hates his guts, boy turns out to be a badass and _also_ a gentleman, boy and girl defeat mummies… I’m a little fuzzy on the plot.” 

James snorted, but he put the movie in the player and settled on the couch next to Clint, snatching the popcorn out of his lap and sequestering it on his own. 

Not that that stopped Clint at all, as he grabbed handfuls to stuff in his face and picked up dropped kernels off the couch to eat them too. 

The movie was surprisingly good, plot driven but not heavy, with enough comedic moments to make him laugh. Ardeth was a surprise, reminding him in a weird way of James, something about the quiet competence and his absolute conviction that everyone around him was a complete idiot. Clint turned to study James contemplatively. 

“What?” James said, after a few minutes. He looked unreasonably grumpy. 

“Have you considered a beard?” Clint said, finally, wondering how that would look. It’d hide James’ jawline, but he could probably rock it, especially with the hair. 

“What?” James asked, turning to look at him in bewilderment.

“A beard,” Clint repeated. “I think you could carry it off.”

James stared at him a moment longer before shaking his head in disbelief and turning back to the screen. 

They put in Jurassic Park next, because it wasn’t late enough to really consider bed and also because Clint loved Jurassic Park - not as much as he loved Robin Hood, but he hadn’t brought that one home - so that Clint could cheer on the Nameless Insurance Guy getting eaten, and the super smart scientist lady kicking ass, and Jeff Goldblum being weirdly sexy. 

“Why is he lying like that?” Clint said, when they had him propped on top of some kind of table or shelf, half shirtless and inexplicably not bleeding out.

“Like what?” James grunted. He was half in love with the animatronic dinosaurs, Clint was convinced; he’d been riveted to the screen since they first made their appearance. 

“All… like that,” Clint gestured. He didn’t know how to explain what he meant. “Half shirtless and spread out. It’s… weird. Like sexy, but bleeding? I don’t know.”

James made a sound like a strangled laugh, but he didn’t answer. 

Making James laugh seemed like a good way to pass the time though, so he started describing how he could take out each dinosaur with his bow single handedly, thus ruining the entire plot of the movie. 

“I don’t think an arrow would penetrate the skin,” James argued. 

Clint shrugged. “Aim for the eyes, then, that’s not too hard a target to hit.”

“The angle from the ground is all wrong!”

“So you climb a tree - there’s like a million trees! Or the fence!”

“The fence _electrocutes people_ , didn’t you see that part?”

“Eh, you just throw a stick and make sure it’s turned off.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot waving _flares_ at a _goddamn T-Rex_. I’m the idiot shooting it with a bow and arrow from the top of the other Jeep.”

It was the most Clint thought he’d ever heard James talk at one time - arguing with him about the imagined logistics of shooting dinosaurs with a Paleolithic weapon - and maybe the most happy and animated Clint had ever seen him. He was lit up, grinning even as he told Clint as derisively as possible how _dumb_ his idea was, both hands waving in the air as he talked, and half turned on the couch towards him. He had one knee bent and the remaining popcorn was constantly in danger of being dumped on the floor, barely caught between his thighs. 

“If you drop that you’re cleaning it up,” Clint warned, grinning as he gestured at the popcorn bowl. 

With a growl, James dropped it on the coffee table so he could continue his point, which was something about how the raptor guy should have _known_ that the raptors were hunting him in packs, he was the _raptor_ guy,

Clint snatched the bowl off the table to grab more popcorn. Watching James was nearly as good as watching the movie, honestly. “Australians, man,” he said, swallowing his mouthful, “what’re you gonna do? Look at that Steve Irwin guy, he’s always dicking around with deadly animals.”

“The only smart person in this whole movie is the woman,” James said, flopping back. He was loose and relaxed in a way Clint seldom, if ever, saw him, sprawled in sweatpants and a t-shirt Clint was relatively certainly actually belonged to him. “She’s the only one with a goddamn bit of sense.” 

“Yeah,” Clint agreed. “It’s usually like that in real life too.”

James gave him another look that was part smothered amusement and part something else as the movie ended with a swell of inspirational music. “I’m goin’ to bed,” he said, leveraging himself up and snatching the nearly-empty bowl from Clint’s hands. “Thanks for all of this.” He gestured vaguely, like Clint wouldn’t know what he meant. 

“You’re welcome,” Clint told him sincerely. 

He went to bed feeling warm and content, another good memory stored up in his chest to mitigate a dozen bad ones, birthdays missed or forgotten, or ruined by whiskey and shouting. 

This was what life was supposed to be, what family was supposed to mean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been reliably informed that Nameless Insurance Guy is called Gennaro and he's a lawyer!!!! Shoutout to agirlcalledbob for making sure that we all know this!!!! Gennaro Deserved Better 2k20


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys
> 
> You might have, um, noticed I'm real behind on updates. Life is kind of kicking my ass right now (as I am sure it is for many of you) so thanks for sticking with this, I hope you enjoy this chapter! 
> 
> You might also have noticed the chapter count has increased. I am notorious for this, but anyway there's a whole extra chapter coming after this one!!
> 
> ETA: thanks to the fan on tumblr who let me know I had a small continuity error so I could correct it!!

Clint was antsy.

Not that he didn’t enjoy his time on the farm, watching Nathan grow up faster than he would have thought possible or watching James navigate this new lifestyle, and helping both of them along the way. He _did_. But this was the longest he’d been out of the field… ever, as far as he knew, barring some kind of injury. He hadn’t been on a mission since his failed (or successful, depending on how you looked at it) attempt to get the Widow in Rome, and including the time he’d spent at S.H.I.E.L.D. afterwards, he had been on downtime for nearly four months. 

It was a long time to be unnecessary. 

It grated on him. His pager (vengefully stuffed in the farthest bottom corner of his duffle where he didn’t have to see it every day, but still checked anyway) had been unnaturally silent since his arrival. He didn’t want to admit it, but Clint was starting to worry. Not that S.H.I.E.L.D. would find him, but that they had found they didn’t need him after all. Clint hadn’t had any other sort of purpose since Carson’s, and the anxiety that he was not as necessary to the organization - to Coulson - was eating at him. 

He’d brought his standard gear with him when he came back to the house - just in case, he’d told himself, though unable to articulate in case of what - and it was simply gathering dust in his bag. 

So on the first sunny, semi-warm morning after James’ birthday, Clint grabbed his bow and took it out behind the barn. He shot methodically, hitting targets known only to himself. The knot in the barn wood there, and the slightly crooked board here, and patterns he picked out against the graying wood, Morse code for his call sign or his birthday, or whatever took his fancy. Sweat gathered at his temples and between his shoulder blades, and he could feel the stretch in his muscles and the burn of his arms that had missed this particular workout. The rhythm and routine of it soothed a bit of the hollow feeling in his chest, but not at all of it. 

“You’re a better shot than your file says.”

Clint didn’t startle at the sound of James’ voice. He’d shot in too many fire fights, over the sound of too many explosions and the shrieking of crowds in his ears for that, but he did release the string just a half second earlier than he would’ve, given the choice. The arrow still flew, straight and true, exactly where he’d aimed it, but the near-slip frustrated him.

Just more proof that he needed to get back to doing his _job_. 

None of that was James’ fault. Or rather, it was related, but Clint couldn’t blame him for it. He knew some of the lack of communication _was_ a message from Coulson. One that said Clint needed to get his head in the game if he wanted to keep playing the field. 

“I’m the best shot S.H.I.E.L.D.’s got,” Clint said, instead of any of the thoughts swirling around in his brain. 

James nodded to concede the point. The sun was much higher in the sky now, the hours flying by in the haze of _point shoot release_ that Clint had burned into his bones years and years ago. It must be time for Nathan’s nap by now, considering the angle of the shadows. 

“You are,” James agreed. He gave Clint a speculative look. “But you’re not even close to being their hand-to-hand expert, and you’re terrible at extractions.”

“I extract people just fine,” Clint argued, moving towards the barn to pull his arrows from the weathered wood. He’d have to re-fletch a half dozen of them, but it was worth it for the way his mind was somewhat calmed by the activity. 

James snorted. “You’re terrible at _being_ extracted, then. Get injured far too often.”

The criticism rankled, because Clint was already sensitive, already worried about his performance and his place. “If I’m so bad, why’d you pick me for your fuckin’ defection then?” he asked acerbically. 

The silence that followed was even more speculative than the look had been. Not quite judgmental, for all that James was watching him with narrowed eyes, but more contemplative. 

“You ever get ahold of your file?”

Clint shook his head. He’d meant to, back when he’d dropped Natasha off with Coulson, but he’d got his head all wrapped up in what was going on with her. Too wrapped up to do the proper snooping he’d meant to do. 

“Your handler thinks you’ve got the potential to be one of the best agents S.H.I.E.L.D. has,” James said, once he realized Clint wasn’t going to say anything else. “Says you operate well under pressure and make snap decisions that usually work out for the best. ‘Headstrong but with good instincts’, I think is what the summary says.”

Clint couldn’t help the little glow of pride at that, the warm coiling in his gut because it was just what he’d needed to hear, though how James knew that he wasn’t sure. 

“Deputy Director Fury thinks you’re ‘stubborn to the point of self-sabotage’ but admits you’ve got your uses.”

He couldn’t hold in a snort at that. Deputy Director Fury either loved Clint or hated him, it was impossible to say, but he sure as shit let Clint get away with a hell of a lot, when Clint took the time to think about it. 

“My file says all that?” Clint said, packing away his equipment methodically, though he held the damaged arrows in reserve to be worked on later. Refletching and repairing arrows was soothing in its own way, something else he’d been doing for so long that it was muscle memory now. 

James shrugged in Clint’s periphery. “Red Room has its own files, but they’ve got the bones of what S.H.I.E.L.D. keeps on record. Your file was more complete than most, since there’s a ‘shoot on sight’ order out on you.”

Some part of Clint was proud of that, and he didn’t even try to hide the smirk that crept over his face. He was good enough to be a target, and that was something in and of itself. 

“Don’t look so smug,” James drawled, “half the Red Room operatives could take you out in close quarters without breaking a sweat. But that’s not why we picked you anyway.”

Clint didn’t answer him, waiting to see where he was going with this conversation rather than arguing the point. He figured he was probably at least a fair bit better than his files indicated, because he didn’t see much hand to hand in the field but he still kept what skills he did have sharp on his own time. He’d always been good at keeping at least a small portion of himself tucked away where not everyone could see it. It usually paid to be underestimated, and he’d always figured S.H.I.E.L.D. was just another entity that didn’t need to know everything. The land they were standing on was example enough of that. 

James sighed. “Your handler has you tagged as someone who’d be persuasive to defecting agents - he cites your own checkered past on that one, and thinks you’re a bleeding heart though he doesn’t say that in so many words. You’re a solo agent, you don’t play well with others, which meant you’d most likely be alone. Natalia and I figured if you didn’t agree, well, it wouldn’t so much surprise anyone if you got taken out in the course of a mission looking for a Widow. But we-” He paused, like he was considering his next words a little bit more carefully. “Natalia figured you were our best shot at what we were after, all things considered. You’re a top agent with good rapport and few attachments.”

Nothing about that was wrong, or even insulting, but something about it put Clint’s back up anyway. If he hadn’t already been so deep in his head, Clint probably would have laughed it off, but as it was he zipped his bow case up with a little more force than necessary. “What’s your point?” Clint bit out. 

“Nothin’. You just seem antsy, so I thought maybe… you might wanna brush up some skills?” James sounded weirdly hesitant in a way that made Clint look directly at him. He was watching Clint with dark eyes, something unreadable on his face, but he didn’t look mocking or even like he thought less of Clint in any way. He was leaning on the remains of a fence, one Clint vaguely remembered as being used for chickens when he was small, with his arms crossed and his hip cocked. When Clint didn’t immediately answer, James shrugged tightly. “If you’re gonna be harboring fugitives, it can’t hurt to be at the top of your game right?”

It took Clint a moment to realize that James was offering what help he could to keep Clint safe and, in turn, keep him and Nathan safe. He wasn’t wrong about Clint not being the best in a close quarters fight - though he probably wasn’t entirely right either - and frankly, the exertion and adrenaline of fighting the Winter Soldier would maybe go a long way towards getting some of the anxiety out of Clint’s system. He could at least truthfully tell Coulson he’d been keeping up his expertise.

“Yeah, alright,” Clint said, “show me what you’ve got.” He moved further into the remains of the field, mostly dirt and the beginnings of new grass with plenty of room for the two of them. James gave him a wicked grin before kicking off the fence, striding Clint’s way, all powerful motion. He moved like a tank, and Clint knew with sudden certainty that he was about to get his ass handed to him and it was probably gonna hurt. He took a moment to pull his shirt up and wipe at his face so that he didn’t get sweat in his eyes, before falling into a fairly standard defensive crouch. 

James’ steps hitched just slightly, and then he was in Clint’s space, wide and intimidating. 

Clint was taller - nearly a half foot taller - but it didn’t make any difference. James barreled into him with speed and precision, and while Clint could tell he was pulling punches because he hadn’t felt any ribs crack and his forearms were only bruised, he was immediately aware that he was completely outclassed. 

Rather than wasting any time pretending he was any less than he really was - because it was eminently obvious that James was far more experienced than Clint was - Clint went straight for dirty street moves he’d learned in the circus and every ounce of combat training he’d ever learned from S.H.I.E.L.D.. 

The skirmish lasted only a couple of minutes at most, before Clint was flat on his back on the ground, the breath knocked out of him and bruises already forming on his arms and back. James leaned over him, just a little breathless and holding Clint down with his metal arm. The sun was angled just right to illuminate part of his face rather than throwing him into shadow, and Clint could see the sharp, self-satisfied grin tugging on the edges of his mouth. Clint swallowed roughly, a weird mixture of emotions churning in his gut. It wasn’t quite fear, because James looked like he was enjoying himself far too much for Clint to feel afraid, but it was there, twisted up with respect and leaving him feeling out of sorts.

“Alright, that’s cheating,” Clint said, aiming for lighthearted banter to dispel the heaviness of whatever was going on in his chest. “Enhanced operative bullshit is for the advanced session, this was meant to be beginner’s practice.”

James snorted, but stood up obligingly, holding his hand out for Clint to take. Clint stared at it suspiciously for a moment but allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. “You telegraph your movement too much,” James said roughly, backing off a couple of steps. “Go again, but don’t think so much about what you’re going to do before you do it.”

Clint wiped his face again, only to find the side of his shirt was ripped widely, so he shrugged it off instead, tossing it over the fence. “I never think about what I’m going to do before I do it,” he told James, squaring his shoulders and rolling his neck, “but sure, let’s go again.”

It turned into something like a routine. They didn’t spar every day - sometimes Nathan didn’t nap, or sometimes James used that time to prep for dinner or do house chores or disappear onto the surrounding property in a fit of anxiety that expressed itself as ‘perimeter checks’ - but it happened often enough that even Clint was starting to see improvement. Soon he could hold his own against James for as long as fifteen or twenty minutes if he really put effort into it. 

The first time he managed to pin James down, Clint celebrated with his knee dug into James’ hip and his arm across his throat, grinning wildly with sweat pooling between his shoulders. “Gotcha,” he said unnecessarily, the giddy sensation of having bested one of the top assassins in the world crowding up in his chest.

James just raised his eyebrow, lying on the ground and breathing harshly. The look was teasing and vaguely familiar, though not one Clint had ever seen on his face before and he couldn’t quite put a context to it. “Good job,” James finally said, after a moment or two had passed. It felt almost like he’d been waiting on something else, and then it hadn’t happened. 

Clint stood up and offered him a hand - same as James had been doing for him for weeks now - and James took it, barely pulling against Clint as he clambered to his feet. “Dibs on the shower,” was all he added, turning back towards the house before Clint could even begin to argue with him, because he’d _won_ dammit, and he deserved something as victory spoils. It hadn’t occurred to him to call first dibs on the shower and now, sweaty and dirty and vaguely itchy, he wished he had. They’d quickly learned that the cranky old water heater would only support one hot shower at a time and now James was taking advantage.

“Dammit, Barnes!” he yelled, but James just gave him a cocky half-wave without slowing his steps. 

***

It was only a few days later that Clint was roused from his bed by the shrieking death siren sound of his pager going off, still buried in the bottom of his duffle but not checked nearly so often since he’d started shooting and then sparring with James. He tumbled out of bed in a sleep-crusted daze, digging frantically through the bag for no other reason than to shut the godforsaken noise off. Before he could get his hands on it, he heard the tell-tale sound of Nathan’s startled crying from down the hall. Finally managing to pull it out of the bag, Clint silenced the pager, but it was far too late. James’ heavy steps were heading towards Nathan’s room, and Clint’s alarm clock was glaring a red-tinged 5:30am at him from the nightstand. 

“Aw, pager, no,” he muttered, glaring at the plastic device. He pushed the arrow at the bottom, lighting the screen up green to illuminate the message.

MISSION CRITICAL. CHECK IN 4-5 0700. 

Clint sighed. Downstairs he could hear the sounds of James starting coffee and toast, of Nathan banging on his high chair table and shrieking the handful of words he knew. 

Looked like vacation time was over. 

It was strange how only a couple of weeks ago he’d been itching to get back to work, and now that it was time to go back he was suddenly reluctant to leave. He stood up, scratching at the bare skin of his stomach and looking for his sweatpants. This had always been temporary, he reminded himself, a home for James and Nathan, and not for Clint, however much James told him otherwise. Clint’s role was to keep them safe and hidden, not play house with the two of them. 

When he got downstairs James was pouring coffee and Nathan was doing his best to shove dry Cheerios into his mouth, looking far too happy for the fact that the sun wasn’t even up yet. James didn’t say anything, but Clint had had enough mornings with Bobbi to know what ‘angrily making coffee’ looked like, and he hesitated at the doorway to the kitchen. 

“Sorry,” Clint muttered eventually, because he also had had enough of those mornings to know he should apologize, even if he didn’t know what exactly he was apologizing for. 

“For what?” James bit out, jabbing at the power button of the machine. 

Clint debated answering. “Waking Nathan up?”

James sighed. “It’s fine,” he said, even though it was obviously anything _but_ fine. “What’s going on?”

“I gotta report in to work next week.”

There was another heavy sigh, and then James pulled out a skillet and some eggs, not turning to meet Clint’s eyes. 

Clint opened his mouth to apologize again, then shut it with a snap. It didn’t help to apologize when you weren’t entirely certain what you’d done wrong. Nathan was awake far too early, but he was up early often enough that it didn’t warrant this level of clear irritation from James. 

He was two cups of coffee deep and staring at a steaming omelette before Clint realized that he was going to miss something important. “Sorry I won’t be here for Nate’s birthday,” he said, finally realizing what the problem was. 

“It’s fine,” James said, not looking up from where he was cutting his own into bite sized pieces and spooning scrambled eggs into Nathan’s mouth, open wide and waiting for bite after bite. 

Once again it was clearly _not fine_. 

“It’s not like he’ll know the difference,” James continued, before Clint could speak. “He’s just a baby.” 

A first birthday was a big milestone though, and now that Clint had realized it was happening, he felt guilt settling into his stomach like a stone. He had to swallow twice to get the mouthful of food he was chewing to go down. “It sucks,” Clint muttered, glaring at his eggs. 

James looked up at him at that, some of the frustration bleeding out of his expression to be replaced with consideration. He tilted his head to the side as he stared at Clint, until Clint finally grew uncomfortable with the look and began forcing more eggs down. “We can do his birthday a little early,” James finally said. “Like I said, he won’t know. And you can be around for cake or whatever. When do you leave?”

“Sunday,” Clint told him, after giving it a moment’s thought. He’d have to catch a plane to New York and report in, but he could probably get a nonstop flight pretty easily. 

“Okay, we can do something Saturday then,” James told him, turning back to his own breakfast. He got up to refill his coffee and offered the nearly-empty pot to Clint as well, who shoved his cup across the table so that James could refill it. 

“‘Kay,” Clint managed, some of the guilt he couldn’t kick bleeding into the word so that it came out soft.

James squeezed his shoulder when he passed Clint to get Nathan out of his high chair, brushing eggs off of his whole body before taking him into the living room for a diaper change and to set him loose for the morning. Somehow the gesture made Clint feel worse instead of better, but he kept his head down and his mouth shut as he finished his breakfast and cleaned up the remaining mess without any prodding at all. 

The next couple of days followed in a similar vein - James was quiet and withdrawn, and Nathan was none the wiser about any of it, burbling and babbling and learning new words as fast as he could spit them out. He’d added ‘bird’ and ‘book’ and ‘toy’ to his vocabulary, and James had finally managed to get him to attempt ‘Papa’ in an effort to differentiate the two of them when he was shrieking.

Not that it mattered in Clint’s mind, seeing as how he was going to be leaving soon and he didn’t know if or when he might be back. Every moment in the house felt like it was borrowed time, the last dredges of a fantasy Clint tried not to allow himself to have, and trying to eke every small moment out of it that he could. He took over bedtime and bathtime and diaper time, telling himself he was trying to give James all the break he could, and really just using the time to catch that whiff of baby-fresh smell and soak up all the giggles he could stand. 

Nathan’s birthday was much more subdued than James’ had been, for all that the setup was essentially the same. James made spaghetti, because Nathan liked to eat it (or more like get it all over himself), and Clint went to town to get another cake and a few small gifts. He ended up with a set of blocks and a small train set and a shirt that said “Little Super Hero” because apparently that was what Clint did now - he bought ironic t-shirts. James gave him a raised eyebrow, but when Clint got up to leave for his flight to New York, James had dressed Nate in the shirt and worn his own ‘Man Myth Legend’ shirt as well to see him off. 

“Be safe,”James said, as Clint was heading down the front porch steps.

“Always am,” Clint said, already mentally a million miles away thinking about what kind of mission he might be being called in for. 

When James snorted, Clint actually paused in the process of unlocking the car to look up. “You’re never careful,” James told him. “I’ve seen your file.”

Clint gave a helpless shrug.

“Be careful,” James said again, his grey-blue gaze boring into Clint’s, forceful and determined. 

Clint swallowed hard. “I will,” Clint promised.

James nodded and turned to go back inside before Clint could get into the car and drive away, Nate waving bye-bye over his shoulder and shouting ‘Da’ at the top of his lungs. 

The band around Clint’s chest didn’t ease up until long after his plane was in the air, headed east for the life he’d known far longer than the one on the farm with James. 

For the first time, Clint longed for a home he thought he’d left behind. 

**

Clint’s return to S.H.I.E.L.D. was uneventful. Coulson didn’t meet him at the door this time, and he dragged himself off to the little-used barracks room that had always been his. He mostly preferred to spend his down time in his apartment, but Coulson had told him check in was 0700, and he knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t going to be on time for that in any universe. Instead he’d got off the plane, made his way into the city and grabbed a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza from a stand, then headed for the compound. It wasn’t late - it wasn’t even dinner time, really, and Clint could drag himself down to the mess hall if he wanted, but mostly he didn’t want to. There was no one there he wanted to see, except maybe Bobbi, and she’d take one look at him and know something was up. No, Clint had one night to get his shit together before he presented himself to his handler for whatever op they’d set up for him, and he was going to use it to do what he did best. 

Compartmentalize. 

All the stuff with James and Nathan and the farm - all that got stuffed down deep, tucked away in a place where he only had to think about it if he wanted to, only had to deal with it if he had to. It got shoved down with the memories of his dad and the circus and Trickshot and all the other bullshit in between, alongside fonder memories of his mom and the first time he’d wowed a crowd, down deep where it wouldn’t bubble up and show at the worst possible moment. Clint was as compromised as it was possible to get, he wasn’t stupid enough to not realize that was the case, but the last thing he needed was for that to show in front of Coulson, or worse, Fury, at the wrong moment. 

He flopped down on the too-narrow, too-short bed in his quarters, his duffle dropped in the middle of the floor on his way across the room. He toed his boots off and rolled until he was more or less on the mattress and stared at the blankness of the ceiling, and wondered just what the fuck he’d been called back in for this time. 

Clint’s skills were pretty specific: solo operative, usually high level kill-orders or tracking down rogue agents. He’d worked hard for that measure of trust and competence, and he wasn’t ready to lose it. Compromised or not, he had a good working relationship with Coulson and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. He wondered if Natasha had given up some specific information that they wanted Clint to track down now. 

He wondered how Natasha was doing at all. He hadn’t heard a thing since he left - not that he’d expected to - and he mostly hadn’t let himself think about it. Compartmentalizing again. Now that he was back in New York, back with S.H.I.E.L.D., he felt the old curiosity and concern drifting back up again, wondering just what she’d been up to since he left. He hoped…

He hoped a lot of things, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath for them. 

Natasha had made her choice, he reminded himself, and he had done everything he could for her. How it turned out at the end wasn’t up to him or her or anyone except the powers that be. Clint felt like she’d be a good asset - she had a stake in the game, after all, someone she wanted to protect - but S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t know that, so he didn’t know how it was going to play out. 

An hour or so of wallowing in his bunk was finally enough for him, and he sat up with an irritated sigh. He shuffled into the small living area of the apartment and scrunched himself onto the couch instead of the bed, flipping the TV on and looking for distraction. Half a dozen channel-clicks in he settled on something ridiculous, some television show that looked like a typical police procedural, as long as you could ignore the fact that all the officers were actually dogs. _Dog Cops_ , the logo pronounced in bright blue and white, with a silver S.H.I.E.L.D. in the background, at the next commercial break. Clint snorted. _Dog Cops_ sounded just about perfect. 

He woke up the next morning with a crick in his neck and Sesame Street playing on the television at full volume. Clint didn’t know what time he’d fallen asleep, there were no windows in his little bunkroom, just knew he’d finally drifted off somewhere in the middle of season two of the ridiculous dog show, and now he was awake, rudely jostled by the incessant beeping of the alarm in the other room. 

He didn’t recall setting it, but that was meaningless in a compound where Coulson was bound to know he’d arrived and also likely had access to his room. 

“Fuck,” he grumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face as he stumbled towards the nightstand and its blaring insistence that he be awake. 

It was 0600, far earlier than Clint would normally drag himself out of his bunk for an early morning briefing, and he briefly considered going back to sleep, but life with a baby had already changed him enough already that he knew it was unlikely he’d be able to fall asleep. 

Instead he dragged on S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued sweats and a t-shirt worn so thin that it was practically translucent in places and shambled towards the mess hall. If he had to do this, he was at least going to do it caffeinated. 

**

“Congratulations,” Phil said, not even missing a beat as Clint collapsed into a chair at the briefing table, a paper cup of coffee - his third - still clutched in his hand. “You’ve been promoted to STRIKE team leader.”

“I’ve been what now?” Clint managed. 

Of all the punishments he’d thought Coulson could devise, making him a _team leader_ hadn’t even pinged on his radar. 

Phil gave him a bland smile before passing over a folder of paper work - Clint’s second most hated job. Inside was a sheaf of papers detailing his increased responsibilities, clearances, and - small mercies - a pay increase. He’d be required to participate in training exercises, team lead coursework, and had a shorter radius within which he’d have to remain when he was on-call. 

On the other hand there was… no upside that Clint could see, flipping through the pages and skimming the words. 

“Can I resign?” Clint said, instead of picking up the pen that Coulson slid over.

“You don’t want to meet your team first?” It was delivered with a raised eyebrow and the tiniest bit of amusement. 

“Haven’t I been punished enough?” Clint asked, but he leaned back in his chair and waved his arm magnanimously. “Sure, bring ‘em in.”

“Sign the non-disclosure page first,” Phil bargained. “It’s the first one in the packet,” he added helpfully, as though Clint couldn’t see that with his own eyes. 

Glaring, Clint signed the bottom of the page, chicken-scratching his name next to it and pausing over the line labeled ‘date’. 

“April 5th.”

Clint scribbled that in too, his pen digging harder into the paper than was strictly necessary. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the date, it was just that it had dragged up feelings he’d thought he’d done a good job of tucking away.

That done, Phil shifted in his chair and pressed a button on the underside of the table, triggering the flat, buzzing tone that signaled the room was being unlocked. Nearly all of Clint’s briefings and debriefings (other than the ones he’d done in medical) were done in locked rooms like this one, to prevent eavesdropping and uninvited guests. When the door clicked its acquiescence, Clint looked up with very few expectations. 

Most of the upper level S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were either already on teams or team leads themselves (like Bobbi), or Clint universally hated them. The last thing on Earth Clint wanted to do was train baby agents, but he wouldn’t put it past Coulson to assign him such a task, since he seemed to be hell bent on making Clint pay for his transgressions in Rome. 

God, if only he knew the half of it.

Instead of any fresh-faced new recruits or the irritating sort of agents that Rumlow tended to surround himself with, Natasha walked through the door, kitted out in standard S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical gear - minus the weapons. The door shut behind her with a soft clang, and she cocked her hip and raised her chin, a challenging look on her face. Her mouth quirked just slightly at the sight of his slack-jawed expression, however, and he felt an anxiety he hadn’t been willing to acknowledge loosen from around his chest. 

“Welcome to STRIKE Team Delta, Agent Barton,” Phil said, sounding smug even without Clint turning to look at him. “You’ll be partnering with Agent Romanov for the remainder of her supervised integration into S.H.I.E.L.D..” He paused. “Unless you’d rather not, of course. I’m certain one of the other Teams would be happy to take her on.”

Clint spun in his chair so fast that the legs screeched a bit against the floor, flipping through the packet in front of him for blanks requiring his signature. Some part of his brain recognized that the move was giving away far too much, but his relief that Natasha was not only okay but was also going to be _partnered_ with him was far too much to pretend otherwise. He slid the now-complete packet back across the table to Phil, some of the pages fluttering out along the way. 

Natasha sauntered the rest of the way across the room, taking the seat next to Clint and bumping their knees together under the table. 

Coulson stacked the paperwork up neatly, taking his time as he tapped it against the surface of the table and organized it until it fit in the folder without stray edges or crumples, before pulling the briefing packet that had been waiting at his elbow to the center of the table and removing its contents. 

“Your mission begins in 48 hours, Delta, and ends when you’ve apprehended or eliminated the target.”

**

“It’s a milk run,” Clint complained on the jet, tightening the chest holster over his shoulders and reaching for a set of knives to tuck away in his belt. Natasha beat him to them, slipping them into pockets at her thighs and getting a pistol of her own 

“Of course it is,” she said. “You didn’t think they’d send me on something _important_ for my first mission did you? It’s a test.”

Clint sighed. Of course it was a test, and of course he knew that, but he didn’t have to like it. It was boring. 

He knew better than to say as much to Coulson, though, which was why Natasha was bearing the brunt of his irritation.

Six hours. All told, they were on the ground in Palau for less than _six hours_ completing Coulson’s busy work, finding and eliminating some low-level gun trafficker that the local authorities could have easily handled themselves if they weren’t all on the take. But still, even as much as Clint complained about having to fly halfway around the world just to spend six hours on the ground (and oh, he complained plenty), that was six blessed hours with just him and Natasha and a clunky sat phone with a shitty signal, and Clint was grateful for that.

It meant six hours of time alone, time they could talk that was mostly unmonitored, where they didn’t have to guard their words so closely. Where Clint felt like he could finally, safely, check in with her and really make sure she was okay. That she wasn’t just putting up a front for S.H.I.E.L.D.. 

“So, uh,” he finally managed, at a small market where he and Natasha were playing tourist, “how was it?”

She glanced at him over the rims of her over-large sunglasses, considering. “It was no worse than I expected, and better than I deserved,” she said after a moment, before turning back to the colorful wares. 

“That’s, uh, that’s good,” Clint said, uncertain how to continue the conversation. She gave him a brief pat on the arm as they turned to the next stall, following a few hundred feet behind their target’s retinue. 

“Yes,” she agreed, moving on and forcing Clint to follow her, the conversation clearly at an end. 

**

“You’ve been practicing,” she accused him, wiping at the edges of her mouth and picking herself off the floor. 

Sparring was apparently part of ‘team building and training’ exercises, and Phil had given him a schedule that he apparently expected them to follow. Natasha wasn’t allowed off the compound unless they were on mission, which meant Clint was spending much more time than usual in his little bunk room. He had managed to get out of the building a handful of times for bagels and coffee and donuts that he brought back and split with her, before they headed to training rooms for scenario run throughs and obstacle courses and shooting drills. 

This was the first time they’d taken to the mats though, and Clint was disgruntled to realize they’d attracted something of an audience. Mostly baby agents, staring at them in poorly-concealed awe, but he caught a couple of Rumlow’s lackeys lingering around the periphery, and Bobbi watching from where she was leaning near the training room door. Clint had done his share of agent-watching, so he couldn’t hold it against most of them, but Bobbi he glared at. 

The moment of distraction was a mistake, because the next thing Clint knew was a flash of red-striped leggings and then he was going down in a tangle of limbs with Natasha’s thighs wrapped around his neck and shoulders as she wrestled him to the ground. 

There was a general round of wolf-whistles and yelling once his back hit the mat, knocking the breath out of him. Natasha looked smug from her perch above him, her not-negligible weight holding him down. 

“Okay,” he said, after a second, “that’s an illegal move that will not be allowed in the future.” He shifted slightly, managing to shrug one shoulder up a little higher under Natasha’s thigh. 

“All’s fair in love and war,” she told him with a smirk. 

Clint could hear the general murmuring of people talking and something that sounded like the slap of leather wallets being opened, but he ignored them. It was the nature of their work, the culture of the place - tensions ran high and people blew off steam in weird ways, many of which included bets. Instead of getting irritated with the situation he gave Natasha a blinding grin, watching as the smug look on her face shifted to something a bit more cautious. 

It didn’t matter that she’d put her guard back up though, because he shrugged his one free shoulder and rolled up onto his upper back, hooking his knees around her chest and _pushing_ , crunching his abs and back muscles to tumble her back over onto her back and him above her for one brief, surprise-filled moment, and then he rolled the rest of the way forward, coming up in a crouch and twisting back to face her. 

Natasha was on her feet again, looking impressed. “You’ve _definitely_ been practicing,” she said again.

“Maybe I’m just better than you thought I was,” he teased, before dropping the ready position he’d been holding and straightening up to crack his spine. 

The fight was pretty evenly a draw, though Clint suspected she’d mostly let him get the upper hand for that last move, because his squirming hadn’t been subtle. Behind her, Bobbi gave him a sarcastic little salute before slipping out of the gym door. The rest of the crowd dispersed slowly behind her, mostly in pairs or small groups and arguing amongst themselves. Clint saw money change hands in a couple of places, and he snorted a laugh. 

When it was just the two of them he turned a look on Natasha, one eyebrow raised. “You did that on purpose.”

She shrugged as she reached for the bottle of water she’d left at the edge of the mat. “Other peoples’ assumptions are only ever to my benefit,” she said loftily. 

Clint snorted. 

Whatever assumptions they’d made about her based on one fight were almost certainly wrong. Clint didn’t think Natasha ever showed her full hand, and she certainly wasn’t going to do it in a crowded training room at S.H.I.E.L.D.. “And what do they assume about you now?” he asked, wishing he’d had the foresight to get a bottled water and heading for the water fountain in the corner instead. 

“Who said anything about what they were assuming about _me_?” She sauntered towards the showers without another word, leaving Clint blinking at her.

**

The next mission took them to Cyprus, where an inordinate amount of drug smuggling took place due to its location. Usually it wouldn’t have attracted S.H.I.E.L.D.’s attention, but there were rumors of a biological agent. Which Clint and Natasha weren’t given much information about but was deemed ‘crucially important to national security’. 

The drugs got destroyed in the explosion, but they did manage to apprehend one of the main regional traffickers, handing him over to Coulson with a partially-complete file containing contacts within the network. 

Coulson’s perfectly bland “excellent work” put a cool but somehow proud smile on Natasha’s face.

**

Clint went back to the farm in June. Nearly in time for his birthday, though he didn’t go out of his way to bring it up, and he found everything just subtly different enough to be jarring. There was the beginnings of a small fenced area just beyond the house, with some kind of plywood structure inside, low and unfinished, and an area plotted out a bit further with freshly tilled soil that he could only assume was planning to be a garden. 

“Did you know you were leasing five acres of land to someone named Elena Chavez?” James said, as soon as Clint came back downstairs from his shower. 

“Uh,” Clint said.

“She raises goats,” James informed him. “She came ‘round to introduce herself to the ‘new owner’ and make sure she was gonna be good to keep her operation. She brought eggs.”

“That sounds… nice?”

“Da!!!!!” Nathan screeched from Clint’s feet, yanking at his pants. 

James snorted. “Well they made good omelettes,” he conceded. 

Clint allowed himself to be dragged into the living room to play with blocks and wondered when this became his life.

**

Abidjan didn’t go _quite_ as smoothly as all the other missions that had come before. And there’d been a fair amount of them - S.H.I.E.L.D. gently testing Natasha’s strengths and loyalties, carefully watching to see how Clint interacted with her as a partner and a team leader - at least a dozen since Clint had come back from Iowa. 

“S.H.I.E.L.D. agents,” Clint yelled over the edges of the collapsed rubble they were behind, “put down your weapons!”

Bullets pinged off of the rocks around them, flinging sharp edges of stone and dust on their way. Clint had a graze on his upper arm that kept bleeding and Natasha had a cut at her hairline that she kept wiping blood away from with her forearm. 

“Try French,” she suggested, sounding far too amused for someone in the middle of a firefight. 

Clint repeated the demand in French, which resulted in the guys on the other side of the empty square increasing their fire. “Any other bright ideas?” he asked, panting slightly. 

She shrugged. “We don’t have an extraction plan.”

“We _never_ have an extraction plan.”

“Got anything good in that quiver you always bring but never use?”

Clint sighed, scooching a little lower in his rock shelter and holstering his pistols. He pulled the recurve off his back and reached for the quiver of arrows behind him, feeling for the one he wanted. “Gimme some cover fire,” he said. “I’m gonna make things go boom.”

Natasha dropped the clips in both her pistols, despite the fact they had ammunition left in them, and replaced them with full clips instead, crouching. “Ready?” 

“Ready,” Clint confirmed. 

They stood smoothly, Natasha laying down a steady stream of fire as Clint drew back on the taut string of the bow, aiming for the biggest cluster of combatants. He released the arrow on a breath and watched as it lodged itself in an overturned car just behind the idiots shooting at them. He reached out to pull Nat down with him, sheltering behind the same outcropping of debris they’d been using for the last half hour. 

The explosion wasn’t as exciting as Clint wanted, and he made a mental note to fiddle with the components later, but it was effective. A few seconds after the dust cleared and the ringing in his ears stopped, the rain of bullets had been replaced by a rapid smattering of shouting in French, and the clatter of weapons from the few remaining combatants as they surrendered. 

“Good extraction plan,” Natasha said, pistols held still at her sides and a grin on her face. 

“That was a _shit_ extraction plan,” Clint told her, but he came up with bow in hand when she stood, another explosive arrow drawn.

**

“Congratulations,” Coulson told them, flipping the file closed on the Abidjan operation. “You blew up half the potential informants, and shot half of what was left.”

Clint shrugged, sprawled out in his chair. His arm was stitched up and he still smelled vaguely of smoke. “But we gave you what, like eight guys? That’s plenty.”

Coulson didn’t roll his eyes, but Clint still got the sense that he was _mentally_ rolling his eyes. “Fortunately, the ones you managed _not_ to kill or maim are anxious to talk, so the powers that be have decided you’ve earned a reprieve. Time off for Agent Barton-” Clint did a silent fist pump. They’d been on the compound or in the field constantly for the last month, and he was ready to collapse on his couch and eat some pizza and not think about terrorists for at least a week. “-and a little extra freedom for Agent Romanov.” 

Clint blinked as Coulson smiled blandly at them and Natasha stared in surprise. “You’re free to leave the compound, Agent Romanov, so long as you are within a two hour call-back at all times.”

“I can leave?” she asked, sounding a bit numb.

“You can even move out if you like,” Coulson assured her, “though the rent prices are prohibitively expensive even on a S.H.I.E.L.D. salary.”

Two hours would give her free run of the city though, Clint couldn’t help but think. And he had a place in Bed-Stuy that barely saw his presence these days, if that’s what she wanted. 

He didn’t mention it until they were out of Phil’s office, until they’d both showered the smell of destruction off their bodies and were re-convening in Clint’s room, which was less likely to be bugged than Nat’s. Which wasn’t to say that his wasn’t bugged at all. Clint wasn’t stupid. 

“So I’ve got this place-” Clint started, before remembering he’d taken Nat there already. “Anyway, if you wanna use it for whatever, you know, you can.” He shrugged awkwardly before passing her the spare key that he usually kept in the drawer of his nightstand, taped to the back for when he inevitably lost his keys. 

As Natasha wrapped her slim fingers around the key, she gave Clint a tenuous smile that shifted quickly into something smug and knowing. “Are you planning on a week away then?” she asked. “Some middle of nowhere getaway?” The look she gave him was significant.

It wasn’t like they didn’t both know that Clint had spent all of his significant downtime in Iowa in the last few months, so he shrugged at her in confirmation.

“Good,” she said quietly. 

The warmth that coiled in Clint’s gut at the thought of going back to the farm meant he couldn’t help but silently agree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always Nny gave me a terrific beta and I love her for it! Extra shout out to Steph who helped me troubleshoot some sticky spots and ideas, and Amy who is always down to help me talk through my ideas. I couldn't write anything without you guys I swear.


	6. Chapter 6

“Your mission-”

“Should we choose to accept it,” Clint interrupted, because they’d been on more missions in the last three months than Clint thought he’d been sent on in the last three _years_ , and he was honestly getting a little tired. 

Coulson didn’t bother to dignify that with a response, continuing as though he hadn’t spoken, “-is to intercept this operative, exchange the data device he will be carrying with one we have altered just slightly.” He slid a large photo across the table for Clint and Natasha to review. It was the slightly-blurry profile of a man Clint didn’t recognize, but from the slight tension of Natasha’s body next to him, he assumed she did.

“Alexander Cady?” she asked, tilting the photo slightly for a better look. 

“Yes, though he has a number of aliases. I take it you know him?”

She shook her head. “Not in the sense you mean. I have seen him a few times, and I was aware of him as a low-level Red Room operative, but we never spoke.”

Coulson nodded as though that confirmed something for him. 

“What’s the data?” Clint asked. “And how are we meant to deliver it?”

“A computer virus gave us an unexpected opportunity to comb through data we would normally not have access to, including his email. He has a meeting with another known Red Room operative in a week, and we would like to… provide that operative with a slightly misleading trail.”

That was unsurprisingly vague, not that Clint had expected anything different, but he wouldn’t be him if he hadn’t asked. 

Coulson held up a slim, black plastic stick, and Clint squinted at it. “What is it?”

“USB drive,” Coulson told him, pulling the cap off to reveal a plug that would fit into a computer port, similar to the way a mouse would be plugged in. “Relatively new technology, but Red Room has access and so do we. The data we want him to have is already on this drive, so all you have to do is make a quick exchange. Watch him to see where he puts it, and replace the one he has with this one.”

Clint held his hand out but Coulson didn’t hand him the device. “Agent Romanov will be making the exchange. You will provide sight line cover and communications, Barton.”

That was new, but Clint didn’t ask any questions. Like every mission they’d been on so far, it was another test. The missions had got steadily more important, and each one had required a bit more of Natasha’s skillset or allowed her a little more leniency in the execution. This was more of the same, an opportunity for Natasha to prove she was capable in the field and that she was trustworthy as well. The fact it was a Red Room agent was just icing on the cake. 

Natasha took the little data drive from Coulson and sat it nearby, then reached for the folder containing the rest of the information on Cady. She flipped through it quickly, Clint looking over her shoulder. He didn’t need to memorize the information, just take it in enough to be able to plan a mission with Natasha and help her out if she got into a sticky spot. It was basically a pick-pocketing job, she could probably do it in her sleep. 

Cady kept a semi-regular routine, had a favored coffee shop and a cafe he liked to frequent, but nothing that stood out as unusual. There was a copy of the email arranging the meeting with someone who had signed their name only as ‘S’, for Thursday at 4pm. The whole thing would only require minimal surveillance a day or so in advance and good enough snooping to figure out where he had the drive. Clint could probably break into his apartment to bug it if they needed. 

“Looks simple enough,” he said. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to leave the city. 

**

They hadn’t even had to bug the place, once Clint got in eye-line of the building. The guy left the blinds open to his office and the little black drive that they presumably needed to steal sat in plain sight on the desk. Privately, Clint thought it would be easier to break in and replace the drive when Cady wasn’t around, and said as much, but Coulson wanted it done a certain way, so that’s what they were doing. 

The day of the exchange, Natasha breezed out of the bathroom of the small apartment S.H.I.E.L.D. had got for them in a blonde wig, baggy jeans, and a crop top, looking like every young woman on the streets and nothing at all like herself. Clint left ahead of her, walking the route they planned to take so she could bump into Cady. He found himself a nice window seat at a small sandwich shop, with comms in his ears and a direct view of where Natasha planned to intercept Cady. 

It happened so smoothly and quickly that Clint almost missed it, Natasha bumping shoulders with the man hard enough to make him fumble the coffee he was carrying, and then she was gone with a panicked-sounding apology and an “Oh my god I am _so_ embarrassed.” 

Ten minutes later she was sitting across from Clint in the shop, wig and sunglasses gone and a plaid shirt over the crop, passing him the drive.

**

“Good work,” Coulson told them, taking the drive and giving Natasha an amused once over. She’d kept the whole outfit except the wig for their debrief, and didn’t look the least bit uncomfortable in a crop top while surrounded by agents for a secret government organization. 

“Take a few days off,” he continued. “It’ll take us a little while to sift through the data and determine the next course of action.” 

Clint was out of his chair almost before Coulson was done talking, already heading for the door. Natasha at least had the manners to wait for him to finish talking, but she was only a few steps behind Clint. 

“Be back by Thursday,” Coulson called after them, still sounding entertained. 

“You need a ride to the airport?” Natasha asked around barely contained laughter. 

Clint rolled his eyes. He knew he was being obvious, but the quiet life James was creating back in Iowa was better than any vacation Clint had ever taken. It was warm and safe, somewhere Clint never had to pretend to be something he wasn’t. There was no cover, no pretense, just honesty and a bit of domesticity that he’d never had before and found he craved. “I’ll take the 7 train, like every other schmuck,” he said, instead. 

“Have fun,” she called, as Clint diverted to the subway station on the next block while she kept walking.

He assumed she was headed for his apartment in Bed-Stuy, but really she could be going anywhere. If he was being honest, he was glad for her that she had that freedom and he didn’t want to seem like he was invading her small amount of privacy to ask. Just because she knew exactly where he was going didn’t mean he needed to know the same in return. 

The plane ticket was exorbitant, but Clint had banked a bunch of hazard pay the last few months and it wasn’t like he had anything else to spend it on, or a lot of time to waste. He got the first ticket he could to Detroit, where he bought a second, slightly less astronomical flight to Cedar Rapids, though he had to cool his heels for a couple of hours in between. Once there, though, he ran into a slight problem.

They were out of rental cars. 

Twenty minutes and one surprised phone call later, James pulled up in the beat up truck Clint had purchased, Nate strapped into a carseat in the back. 

“Sorry,” Clint said, as he swung into the passenger seat. He hadn’t even brought a bag for fucks’ sake, and he was still wearing the nondescript clothes he’d put on for the mission that morning. Maybe Natasha had been right to laugh at him. 

“What for?” James asked, shifting the truck into gear and pulling away from the curb. The Cedar Rapids airport was too tiny for anything but a single road running along the front of the building, where people simply pulled up to pick up passengers and then drive away again. It was nothing like La Guardia, and it was something that Clint thought he used to hate, but somehow now found charming. 

“Inconveniencing you?” Clint guessed. 

“It’s fine,” James said. “Needed to get outta the house anyway. And we’re out of milk, so I hope you don’t mind a stop at Fareway.”

“Nah,” Clint said, relaxing back into the seat. He twisted slightly so he could make faces at Nate, who had started shrieking in excitement as soon as he’d spotted Clint getting in the car. “What’s up kiddo?”

Nathan shoved his foot towards Clint, where he’d clearly wrestled one of his shoes off and dropped it onto the seat beside him. It was too hot for shoes anyway, Christ, Clint had forgot what Iowa summers were like. “Toes!” he exclaimed, clearly pleased with himself. 

“Yeah buddy, those are your toes.” Every time Clint saw the kid he had at least a dozen new words to show off. “Where are your eyes?”

Nathan obediently scrunched his eyes up and put both his fingers in them. 

“What about your ears?”

The game kept him occupied all the way to Fareway, and then Clint pushed the cart and kept him entertained, letting Nate shove his fingers into Clint’s eyes and ears, and one time his nose, making James frown at him, but they made it through the store with little fuss.

By the time they got home, Clint was feeling the exhaustion of the mission plus too much travel, almost bone-weary. The sight of the front porch was a welcome relief, something in his chest relaxing. James had obviously been busy because the sagging steps had been replaced with fresh-cut boards, and while some of the porch spindles were still missing, a lot had been replaced. The turned soil that Clint had identified as a garden on his last trip was now growing, green exploding all over the fresh-turned earth, though the only thing he recognized was a row of corn growing in the back.

There was a gentle murmur of sound that Clint couldn’t quite place, rustling interspersed with quiet trills and chirping that drew his attention to the fenced-off area near the house. 

“Da!” Nate screamed, before Clint could get a better look, and he turned back to the truck, where Nate had his arms and legs stuck straight out in the seat and James was unloading groceries, hanging sack after sack on his prosthetic arm. “Out!” Nate demanded, squirming. 

Clint laughed and went to get him, fumbling with the buckles and sliding his sneakers on his feet before lifting him to the ground. Nathan grabbed him by the hand to drag him over to the fencing. “Da! Chippins!”

Inside there were half a dozen chickens, beige-ish orange and clucking softly. The fencing had evolved since Clint was last home, coming up chest high on him and wrapped in chicken wire, with a little raised house on one side. Two of the chickens came straight to the fence when Clint and Nate got close, poking their beaks out curiously and making more little noises that Clint would never have guessed a chicken made. 

“When did you get chickens?” Clint called, carefully pulling Nate’s little grabby hands away from the wire. He had no idea if chickens pecked?

James grunted in response. “Got ‘em from the goat lady. She had too many. They lay a lot of eggs.”

He sounded vaguely confused by the whole thing as he breezed by, all the groceries loaded up in his arms. 

“Aw, hey, I was gonna help,” Clint said, standing up from where he’d crouched next to Nathan. He swung the toddler up into his arms at the same time, keeping him away from inquiring chickens. 

“You’re helpin’ plenty,” James assured him. “Keepin’ the kid busy.”

Nathan was wiggling to be let down again, so Clint sat him on the ground, herding him away from the coop.

“They won’t hurt him,” James said, starting up the steps. “He feeds ‘em sometimes. They’ll eat out of your hands. Complete sweethearts, I swear.” He went inside. 

Clint got closer to the coop with Nathan then, reaching out to stroke across the nearest chicken’s feathery head, as it closed its eyes and tilted into the touch. Nate got his hand in the fence through the gap and patted clumsily at the chicken’s tail feathers and Clint watched with amusement as the chicken perked up and the floofed out all its feathers before giving a shake, almost like a dog. 

Clint would have been happy to stay and investigate the chickens a little longer - he hadn’t been up close and personal with any before - but Nathan was already dragging him away again though, now headed for the back of the house with Clint trailing along behind him, slightly lopsided as he leaned down to dangle his hand to be low enough for holding purposes. The barn wasn’t looking much less dilapidated than it had before, but Clint thought he saw a few patches on the roof where it’d been repaired, and the doors at least looked like they were in working order now. 

“Kibbee!” Nate told him, pulling determinedly at Clint’s arm until Clint let him get to the doors, though he crouched down and didn’t get pulled inside. Who knew what sort of shape the place was in. Nate crouched next to him, eyeing the dark interior and then made a poorly-imitated clicking sound with his mouth, clucking his tongue, the way some people called dogs. 

“Here kibbee kibbee,” he said, slightly garbled, and making Clint snort a laugh.

But a few seconds later a wary, fluffy cat edged its way out of the door, keeping close to the wood. It had a wide face and fluffy tail, striped greyish-brown with a white chest, and glared balefully at the two of them. 

“Kibbee!” Nate told Clint, grinning up at him and pointing, but unlike the chickens, he didn’t try to get close.

Which was good because the cat didn’t look friendly. It looked a lot like how James had looked back in Rome, angry and ready to commit murder at the slightest provocation. 

“Yeah, that’s a kitty, you’re right,” Clint said, finally picking up on the word. He scooped Nate up again, dusting off the knees of his pants. “Let’s leave him alone though, he doesn’t look happy to see us.”

The cat flicked its tail in agreement. Clint turned and carried Nate back to the house, stomping his sneakers off on the back mat before letting himself in. James was already at the stove, something sizzling in a pan, and Clint dropped Nate in the living room next to a pile of toys. 

“You got chickens and a cat?” Clint asked James, leaning on the counter out of the way. “It’s like a real farm around here.”

“The cat found us,” James corrected, dicing carrots. “Dunno what he hangs around for, he doesn’t want petting and I don’t even feed him.”

Clint laughed. “He’s a barn cat, he’s probably eating mice. Honestly he’s doin’ you a favor. What’d you name him? Nate’s calling him ‘kibbee.’”

James rolled his eyes. “He hasn’t got a name, he’s not a pet.”

“How are you going to have a cat and not give him a name? Bet the chickens have names,” Clint teased, only to watch in fascination as a dull red flush broke out along James’ cheeks, half-hidden by the fall of his hair. “They do!” he said, delighted. “What did you name them?”

James mumbled something that Clint didn’t catch, so he sidled closer, reaching out to snag one of the carrots before it got turned into a tiny cube. James shot him an exasperated look, and Clint grinned widely at him. 

“What was that?” he asked, crunching on the vegetable. “Didn’t quite hear you.”

“I said shut up,” James ground out, which was completely undermined by the fact he was still blushing. “And get out of the food, there’ll be dinner in an hour.”

Clint reached for another carrot, just to be contrary, only to get a slap delivered by metal fingers that stung enough to make him think better of it. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his face though, even as he abandoned the kitchen for the safer ground in the living room, helping Nate build up and knock down block tower after block tower.

It was good to be back. 

**

The next mission was as simple as the last, except for how it required Natasha to break into some shady dude named Steshenko’s gaudily expensive house in Rublyovka, creeping on his computer rather than stealing something. Clint was outside the fenced-off property on the comms, watching for any unusual activity, but he couldn’t see Natasha at all and was reliant on her verbal communication to know she was alright. 

It was another of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s little tests, another extension of Natasha’s leash to prove her worth and trustworthiness. They’d packed the two of them off to Russia, probably at least partly to see how she reacted to being back in her home country. Predictably - at least to Clint - she hadn’t seemed the least bit perturbed, and her Russian was helpfully flawless. They’d cased the house for a couple of days prior to Nat’s little jaunt inside, timing guard rounds and watching for Steshenko’s routine, then Nat had crept in just past midnight, when the whole property was silent as a tomb, leaving Clint to watch through his scope and listen to her even breathing on the comms. 

It was boring.

She was in and out of the house in less than twenty minutes, a drive full of data in her pocket, and they were back on a plane to the U.S. later that morning. 

The whole thing could have been done by a rookie agent if it weren’t for the fact that S.H.I.E.L.D. was still measuring Natasha’s every move. 

They didn’t even get any time off for good behavior after, Coulson cautioning them to stay nearby. They both ended up in Bed-Stuy, Clint wrapped up in a blanket on his worn-out couch while Natasha took the bed, because at least it wasn’t the compound. 

Thirty-six hours later they were back in the same debriefing room, facing Coulson across the exact same table. This time he had a slightly thicker file and a determined look on his face. 

“We’re going to embed you into Steshenko’s home,” he began, looking at Natasha. “Is there anyone associated with him that you think would recognize you?”

Natasha gave the question a few seconds of thought and then did something with her shoulders that was caught between a shrug and a head shake. “Not that I am aware of and no one we saw while we were there looked familiar, but people move around, new allegiances are formed all the time. It’s possible someone might. I can change the way I look - a little hair dye, some colored contacts. How long do you expect me to be there?”

Coulson pressed his lips together. “Not sure. The files you recovered indicate that Red Room is working on something big, something that they are excited about, but it’s not clear what. The files reference ‘Koschei’, does that mean anything to you?”

Natasha shrugged. “Russian fairytale, an evil being, immortal, brings death upon his enemies, etc. etc. The usual. Nothing you couldn’t have looked up yourself. I don’t remember hearing anything about it when I was still a Red Room agent, if that’s what you mean.”

Stacking the papers in his hand together, Coulson hummed thoughtfully. “Alright. Change your appearance however will make you least noticeable. There’s an opportunity to get you in to Steshenko’s compound as a ballet instructor for his daughters, and after that we want you to gather as much information as you can. Anything you overhear, documents, photos, conversations. Guests.” He turned to Clint. “We’ll set you up nearby in an apartment, you can be the live-in boyfriend, hang around in case something goes wrong and Romanov needs extraction. Otherwise you’ll report to me regularly.”

“This is kinda vague,” Clint complained, glancing through the paperwork. “There’s no timeframe, no clear objective. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Coulson informed him, “you just have to do it. You’re not the only team working a lead on this case, and Fury thinks if we don’t crack it open soon, we’re going to regret not having worked it out.”

Steshenko’s house was in an extremely exclusive area, but the apartment S.H.I.E.L.D. procured for Clint (and Natasha, when she could get away from her duties) was a shithole. The bathroom sink leaked steadily, and the carpet needed more than a simple cleaner could manage - it needed to be ripped out and burned. Clint passed most of his time being bored out of his mind. He had cable, at least, and an internet connection, and enough Russian to order out dinner, but not much else to occupy his time. He definitely found himself thinking entirely too much about James and Nathan when he was supposed to be focused on his job. 

Natasha came and went at odd hours. She’d dyed her hair an unremarkable brown, cut it short to her jawline and started wearing brown contacts. She did something with her make-up that made her look older but pretending to be young, a look Clint found fascinating even if he couldn’t quite figure out how she pulled it off. She looked 27 masquerading as 22, even though she was really only 18, something jaded about her look to go with the poorly-covered exhaustion under her eyes. 

“Anything new?” Clint asked, after they’d been doing this nearly a week. 

Natasha collapsed on the couch next to him, kicking off her shoes and staring into the distance. 

“The wife is unhappy, the children are ignored,” she said, with a shrug. “It is nothing I did not expect. They don’t talk much around me, I am still too new, but the wife complains all the time about Steshenko’s ‘business associates’. It’s possible she will be a good source of information.” She hummed. “I will give it another week of listening and snooping, but I think he is being careful. There is something going on, Coulson is right, but I don’t yet know what it is.” There was a pause, and then she made a frustrated sound. “I have my own sources that would be able to tell me more, but I don’t think S.H.I.E.L.D will allow me to contact them.”

Clint cocked his head, thinking about it. “I’ll talk to Coulson,” he said. “If you don’t learn anything useful in the next few days.”

A week later he phoned Coulson. “We’re not getting anywhere with this,” he said bluntly. “Your guy doesn’t trust Natasha, or apparently anyone else, and he’s careful to schedule his meetings for when she’s not there. The wife talks a lot, but she doesn’t know anything pertinent; he keeps it from her, too.”

Natasha was on the other side of the room, stretching out the day. She was as frustrated with the situation as Clint, perhaps moreso. She had been used to having much more freedom in her methods when she worked for the Red Room, and the restrictions were chafing. 

Coulson sighed into the phone, though the sound was grainy on the sat phone they were using. “What do you want to do?”

It wasn’t often Coulson asked his opinion, but he tended to listen to Clint when he did. “Natasha thinks she can tap some old contacts, maybe stir up some information that way.”

There was a pointed silence while Coulson thought it over, and Clint barely refrained from holding his breath. If they could get Coulson to agree to this, it would be a big step for Natasha and it might actually get them the information S.H.I.E.L.D. desperately wanted. 

“Okay,” he said, after a long moment. “You can use the Widow’s resources, but _carefully_ , Barton. Don’t attract attention; we don’t want the Red Room alerted that we’re investigating.”

“Duh,” Clint responded, turning to give Nat a thumbs up and a wide grin. She rolled her eyes but stood up from the folded-over position she’d been holding and stretched out her shoulders. 

“I mean it,” Coulson said. “Use some sense for once.”

“Natasha has enough sense for both of us, no worries.”

Coulson made a noise that meant he wasn’t impressed, but he hung up the phone before Clint could really get into the spirit of the argument. 

“Well?” Natasha asked. 

“We’re a go for looking up some old friends.”

Her smile turned sharp and feral. 

***

“Who’s this guy again?” Clint complained. They were in some backward town outside Moscow, where the residents gave Clint suspicious glances and carefully didn’t look at Natasha at all. Her hair was back to its signature red, though Clint wasn’t sure if she’d dyed over the brown or if it had been a temporary color, and she moved with an ease of purpose he hadn’t seen in months. 

“Niko Constantin,” she replied, glancing up at him. It was August, but Russian summers left something to be desired, and Clint was still chilly in jeans and a thin jacket. He shook his hair back out of his eyes as they walked. “He was an… experiment. A failed one. They tried to introduce the Black Widow program to a class of male students. It was unsuccessful, but Niko came closest.” She paused. “The Soldier did most of the training for it. Niko holds grudges.”

“How’d he walk away?” Clint asked, because he’d read enough of the files to know that Widows didn’t leave the program. They didn’t leave at all.

She shrugged. “We were not told. He has a kill on sight order, but no one has managed to successfully complete it. He is not often seen.”

“Why do you think he’ll meet with you?”

“The only thing he hates more than the Winter Soldier is the Red Room, and I’m sure word of my defection has made it to his ears. He agreed to the meeting already.”

Niko Constantin was the kind of thinly-veneered shade of crazy that made Clint nervous. 

He’d agreed to the meeting but only on his own terms, so they found themselves in a skeevy club, dim and smoky and cramped, with bad music pounding through the speakers loudly enough that Clint knew he was going to end the evening with a raging headache. He and Natasha had agreed that they weren’t intending to pretend to be something they weren’t - Clint wasn’t going to play worthless boyfriend or tag-a-long, they were going to play up Clint as Natasha’s handler. Constantin knew Natasha had defected, it was common knowledge amongst Red Room agents, so there was no need to hold up any pretense. 

Constantin was in a small room adjacent to the club when they arrived, lounging in a chair with a smirk that was just a little bit unhinged at the edges. 

“A Widow,” he said, when they arrived, looking Natasha over with interest and ignoring Clint completely. “It is an honor.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “We both know you’d kill me if the opportunity presented itself, there is no need for untruths between us, hmm?”

He shrugged. “If it were profitable, perhaps. There is a price on your head, but it is not high enough to be worth the effort. I have… other interests at the moment.”

Natasha slid into one of the chairs across from Constantin, looking relaxed and confident. Clint stayed standing, leaning on the wall near the entrance and keeping an eye on things. There was no one else in the room that he could see, but there was an exit just behind the seat Constantin had selected, which could be an entrance for backup just as easily as it could be Constantin's quick exit. “What kind of interests would those be?”

He gave her an evaluating look. “Nothing that would be of any use to you. There are rumors that my old instructor has also left his former employment, though he did not apparently choose a new one to hold his leash as you have.” He gave Clint a significant look. “I am interested as to his whereabouts. Nothing more.”

Natasha made a noise of mild disbelief. 

“You were supposed to kill him, were you not?” Constantin asked, when she didn’t say anything else. 

She gave a small shrug. “It was not worth the effort.”

“A pity.”

“I’m not here about the Soldier,” Natasha said. 

“No,” Constantin said, “I imagine you’re here about Koschei.”

Natasha cocked her head as Clint fought to keep the same disinterested expression and slouch he’d already adopted. “And if I were?”

“I would say that I’d be willing to trade the information, in exchange for a favor.”

“What sort of favor?”

“The kind that leaves the Winter Soldier indisposed. Permanently.”

Clint braced himself. There was no way Natasha could promise that, but they needed the information. 

“What makes you think I can even find him?” Natasha asked, after a moment.

“Oh you won’t have to,” Constantin assured her, smirking slightly. “Red Room is partaking in just the sort of thing he’d have a vested interest in stopping. We all know he took a valuable asset when he left - the Koschei program is going to make every asset more valuable than before.” He spread his hands across the table, palms up. “Red Room controlled the Soldier, and the Widows, but they were always… time-sensitive. The Soldier was particularly difficult, as I recall, which is why the Widows were raised as children. But you can’t stay a child forever, and even enhanced soldiers age.” He shrugged. “They are looking to change that.”

It was all Clint could do to keep his breathing nice and even. The worst part was that Constantin wasn’t wrong - if what he was implying was true, and the Red Room had more children to manipulate and some kind of way to control the aging process, James would want to put a stop to it, by whatever means necessary. Only Nathan would be able to keep him from raiding Red Room bases until he eradicated the situation.

“Okay,” Natasha said, after a moment. “Tell me what I need to know.”

**

“I’m in the lab, initiating download.”

Natasha’s voice was tinny in the comms, but she sounded calm and sure. They’d been over the plan a dozen times since Clint had got approval from Coulson, but he wished he could feel half as confident as Nat sounded. Where Clint had seen a hindrance - Constantin’s demand that they deliver the Winter Soldier was completely impossible, or so he’d thought - Natasha had seen an opportunity. 

“Nico knows what the Soldier looks like, sure, but he won’t be at the base. We just have to put on a good show,” she’d said. 

A good show turned out to be Clint, kitted up like James using various bits Nat had managed to collect across the city. It was an odd position to be in - Clint knew now that James had never wanted to be the Soldier, and had no intentions of ever being him again. He’d had it forced on him and now here was Clint, picking up the mantle. And granted, he was doing it with good reason - tricking both Red Room and S.H.I.E.L.D. into thinking the Winter Soldier was dead would only benefit James and Nathan (and Clint and Natasha) in the long run, but it still felt somehow wrong to be doing it without James’ knowledge or permission. Clint didn’t think James would be upset about it, the whole thing just felt vaguely shady. Not shady enough that Clint wasn’t doing it, of course, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up, but uncomfortable all the same. 

“Copy,” Clint whispered. He was acting as back-up on the comms, but in reality he was about to put on the performance of a lifetime. 

“Estimated download time seventeen minutes.”

That was his cue. He scaled down the side of the building he’d been using as a perch, duffle slung across his back as he tried to keep silent. It was important for their story that the comms remain on and nothing seem amiss until it was time for _everything_ to seem amiss. At ground level he slipped into the shadowy alleyway and began strapping into new gear. He kept the new tac pants and undershirt, but he added a kevlar vest over the one he was already wearing to bulk him out and change his body profile, and strapped as many guns and knives as was humanly possible to carry. There was a leather jacket that didn’t look exactly right, but Nat had managed to remove the decorative metallic studs and it had enough straps to give off the right impression. There was a wig that she’d taken scissors to and a black mask that also wasn’t quite right but would likely do in low light and combat situations. She’d even managed to pick up some kind of metal-looking glove for Clint to wear under a leather fingerless glove. 

When he made his way to the Red Room lab they were infiltrating, Clint tried to channel that move-like-a-tank, murder strut situation that James excelled at. 

“I’ve got movement at the east entrance,” he muttered into the comms.

“Twelve minutes to download complete.”

“I’m not sure you’ve got that much time,” Clint said. “It looks like you’ve got competition.”

Clint picked up the pace. He was breaking into the compound on the east side, near the residential area, and conveniently close to the security hub. The timing for this part of the job was going to be crucial. There was a guard round coming up in the next 90 seconds and Clint needed to make sure his entrance coincided with it. The door was around a blind corner and the guard rotations were noticeably lax. 

Right on time, the single security guard rounded the corner and took a silenced pistol round to the face. 

“Whoever this guy is just put his fist _through_ a guard’s head, Romanov, you better make it fast,” Clint lied, letting disbelief and caution creep into his voice for the benefit of anyone who might later review their communications.

“Which fist?”

Clint punched in the code Constantin had given them for the doors and hoped for the best. It beeped and there was a snick as it unlocked. “What?” he asked, feigning confusion.

“Which fist?” Nat repeated, her voice tight.

“Uh, left, why?”

Nat let out a string of blistering Russian curses. 

Clint slipped into the building and headed straight for the nearest security camera. He made a point to look directly into it before shooting it out, and then he hit the corner, running for the security office. The countdown was really on now. 

“What’s the problem?” Clint asked, trying to keep his breathing even as he ran. 

“ _Soldat_ ,” Natasha spat. “The Winter Soldier.”

“Aw, fuck,” Clint muttered. “Time to pull the plug?”

“No. Nine minutes left. I can make it.”

Clint sighed audibly, then took a deep breath and pulled a second pistol. He started talking as he twisted the handle on the door to the security room, grateful to find it was unlocked. Sloppy on their part, beneficial for him. He let his mouth run on autopilot as he barrelled through the doorway, hoping that his chatter would mask any noises he wasn’t able to prevent. The guns were silenced, but that just meant his shots were muffled. He clocked three guards at a bank of monitors at the same time that he shot them, quick and deadly headshots before they had time to raise any alarm. 

“I know he’s here Barton, I can hear him. Eight minutes left on download. Hopefully the guards will slow him down.”

“The guard outside didn’t slow him down at all,” Clint muttered, pulling the EMP device they’d got from a guy who knew a guy. Clint hoped the damn thing worked. Natasha had a similar device on her, and the goal here was to set them off simultaneously. “I doubt whatever security patrol is happening inside is going to do better. I think you should pull out.”

“Seven minutes.”

Clint set the EMP in the center of the room. Red Room had very helpfully grouped their servers in with their security, probably thinking that would keep both more secure, but they were about to find out how wrong they were. 

“I have motion in the security room,” Clint said into the comms, then flipped the switch on the device that would shut down every electronic device in a two block radius. Including his comms. Natasha was supposed to be doing the same in the lab on the other end of the compound. 

At least now he didn’t have to worry about making noise. He pulled a second device out of his pocket - and damn, these pockets on these tac pants were helpful, he had to hand it to James on that one - and set it on a timer which luckily, by virtue of being off when Clint’s EMP activated, still worked. He set five minutes and ran for it. He headed back to his ingress point and dragged the dead guard inside, then tracked deeper into the residential section to drop off a couple more explosive devices, staggering the timers. He made his way further into the compound, pausing only long enough to set up more staggered bombs and shooting any guards he happened across, counting off seconds in his head. 

Bursting into the lab he found Nat setting her own explosives. She’d already pulled the USB for S.H.I.E.L.D. from the mainframe, and Clint honestly had no idea whether anything she’d managed to download had survived the EMP wipe, and he didn’t have time to worry about it.

“You’re really pulling that off,” she said conversationally, putting ninety seconds on her own timer. 

“Fuck off,” Clint muttered, yanking the wig and leather jacket off, before dumping them and the gloves right next to her bomb, where they were sure to be lost in the explosion. After a moment’s thought he dropped the second Kevlar as well. If they were caught on some grainy footage exiting the lab together, Clint could always claim he went in after Nat, but she wouldn’t be able to explain escaping with the Winter Soldier. 

Clint followed Nat out the way she’d come into the compound, through a twisting route of narrow corridors and delivery doors until they were bursting out into the cool, damp night air. Clint barely had his feet on the ground when the explosions started. He’d set them up to start in the residential area and then go off in intervals from that side of the building to the other but-

The lab exploded behind them, throwing a wave of heat and sound out at them that Clint felt on the back of his neck and vibrating in his chest. It was a little too close, they weren’t quite as far out as they’d meant to be, and the ringing in his ears as they ran probably didn’t mean anything good. They were alive though, and the compound was still blowing up behind them, with “the Soldier” still inside - exactly as they’d planned.

If S.H.I.E.L.D. got the data they needed from Natasha’s USB then that was fine, but privately Clint was of the opinion that they didn’t need any science on how to enhance their agents, and the whole thing going up in flames could only be a win. 

And now James could be safe - both Red Room and S.H.I.E.L.D. would think him dead, and the hunt for him and Nate would end. Clint could only imagine the relief that James would feel, knowing that he could go on and live his life with less caution, raising Nathan the way he deserved without fear of alerting the Red Room to his presence. Clint felt pretty damn relieved, so it stood to reason that James would be downright elated. It was sheer luck that they’d been given this opportunity, and Clint was grateful for the opportunity to capitalize on it, to give James even more safety than he already had. To give Nathan that opportunity for a fresh new life, away from scientists and doctors and government agencies. The chance to just be a normal kid with normal goals and dreams. Or as normal as any genetically engineered supersoldier baby could have, anyway.

Clint had no illusions that they would ever be entirely free of the fear of being discovered, but this thing that he and Nat had managed to pull off was something that would give them the kind of security that just being in hiding hadn’t - it gave them some freedom to be whoever they wanted to be.

**

It was two weeks before Clint got to go back to the farm. 

Two excruciating weeks of debrief, and more debrief, and then Fury’s frustration that the USB drive had been wiped with the EMP so they had _nothing_ to show for the mission.

“Well, we blew the Winter Soldier up, that’s gotta count for something, right?” Clint had asked.

“You blew up your mission objective!”

Additionally, Clint had been in and out of medical with ringing in his ears and persistent vertigo. He’d done a number on himself, with expected-to-be-permanent mild hearing loss, rather than just the intermittent issues he’d had since he was a kid. He could get by without hearing aids, but he could no longer hear a variety of quiet sounds that made up the background noise of everyday life. 

Pulling up to the farm in yet another rental car to see the garden in full bloom and the chickens in a coop, it was easy to feel like the loss was worth it.

Plus-

“Nasha!” Nathan screamed, barreling out of the front door on chubby toddler legs as Clint and Natasha got out of the car. “Nasha home!” He didn’t even give Clint the time of day as he went streaking by, aiming for the final person he hadn’t seen in months. The idea that Clint had had that Nathan would eventually grow to forget him was obviously wrong, judging by how enthusiastically he welcomed Natasha’s reappearance. 

James was right behind him looking quietly bemused as he took in their rumpled appearances. They’d driven the whole way from New York rather than flying, so they’d be harder to track. Natasha had finally been given her independence after proving her loyalty- she even had her own apocalypse beeper now - but that didn’t mean either of them thought S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t watching at all. 

“How’d you manage this?” James asked, skeptical.

“We killed you,” Natasha told him dryly, turning to grab her bag from the backseat. 

“Congratulations,” Clint said, grinning. “You’re dead.”

James looked down at himself and then back up at them. “...Thanks?”

“No problem,” Clint said, patting him on the back as they went inside. “Dead men don’t have international manhunts out on them, and besides, stomping around a Red Room base blowing shit up while pretending to be you was probably the highlight of my career. Don’t know how you managed with that hair though, it’s a real bitch.”

Natasha breezed past them both, heading for her own room with Nate toddling after her, all excited babbling and chatter that put a smile on her face. Clint didn’t know if the smile was for the baby or for the relief of being back on the farm - that same relief Clint felt every time he came here, the release of pressure and pretense, the ability to just let go - but he could feel a similar emotion bubbling up inside of his chest. 

James was wearing tattered jeans and an equally worn shirt, and he had a streak of flour on his thigh to go with the splattering of something across the front of his shirt - all signs that he’d been cooking. Even James’ early attempts had been better than anything Clint could manage, and now that he had time and space to really experiment, everything James made seemed like the best thing Clint had ever eaten. If there was anything Clint had missed more than just being here and breathing fresh air that didn’t feel heavy with doubt and suspicion, it was having a home cooked meal that wasn’t from the S.H.I.E.L.D. compound or take-out from a box. 

It was _so good_ to be back.

“So,” Clint asked, once they were up the stairs and out of sight, “what’s for dinner?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge enormous thanks to Steph and Nny, who have hand-held me through this process in an immeasurable way. They have both given me so much feedback and encouragement and grammar checking - this fic would not be nearly half as good as it is without their input. Also thanks to Amy and Feathers who also helped plot check, and Feathers who was invaluable with his comic book knowledge as always. I am so fortunate to have you all in my life.

**Author's Note:**

> This universe is a genuine labor of love for me, and I unabashedly and wholeheartedly adore the entire premise. I also unabashedly and wholeheartedly apologize to everyone who's had to hear about it from me for approximately the last nine million years. I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry. Especially Amy, Nny, and Steph. I love you guys, thanks for humoring me at all times, you're the best.
> 
> The most thankful and humble appreciation to Nny, who beta read this so well and really helped make sure it is the best fic that it can be, committed so much commacide, and helped me make my thoughts more cohesive, more concise, and more thoughtful. Thank you sweetheart, you have been a godsend.


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